Flamingos sheltering in a bathroom for a hurricane? Call it tradition.
As Hurricane Ian hit southwest Florida on Wednesday, images of devastation dominated television news reports and social media streams. But one image, taken from a St. Petersburg botanical garden, was striking for a different reason.
It showed about a dozen cotton-candy pink flamingos huddled in a public bathroom — a stark contrast to the images of Florida’s washed-out bridges, roofless homes and flooded roadways.
The birds were schlepped into the bathroom because Ian, forecast to become a major storm, was expected to cause catastrophic damage in the Tampa Bay area surrounding Sunken Gardens, which is home to a variety of birds and other animals.
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Before Hurricane Andrew, a Category 5 storm, pummeled South Florida in 1992, a zoologist at what was then Metrozoo (now Zoo Miami) snapped a photo of dozens of pink flamingos huddled in a bathroom between stalls and sinks — an image that ended up going viral in its own way in the pages of newspapers. The storm was considered directly responsible for the deaths of 23 people and caused an estimated $26 billion in damage in the United States, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The National Weather Service still considers Andrew one of the most powerful hurricanes to strike the United States. Ian is also now considered to rank among the most powerful.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/flamingos-sheltering-in-a-bathroom-for-a-hurricane-call-it-tradition/ar-AA12qVSq
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