This is one of the most famous visitors to the Hamptons in recent years.
A sparkling pink American flamingo was spotted swimming in the scenic waters of East Hampton’s Georgica Pond this week, marking the first time the graceful creature has been spotted in New York, an expert told The Post.
Kathy Blinken was working remotely from her mother-in-law’s house on Friday afternoon when she first saw the not-so-birdlike creature.
“I was looking out at the pond and there was a flamingo right in front of me,” she says, “and I thought, ‘Wait a minute, that’s a weird-looking swan.’ As soon as it lifted its head I knew it was a lost flamingo.”
Blinken’s husband is Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s cousin. East Hampton Star She couldn’t take a good photo, so they made it so she could.
The bird, which is native to the West Indies, northern South America and the Yucatan Peninsula, was still there Saturday afternoon, “just hanging out.”
“I’ve been watching them all day with my telescope,” she says. “They fly off and do a few banking turns and come back. They’re just so cute.”
Hundreds of bird lovers flocked to catch a glimpse of the creature.
“He gets a lot of visitors. I woke up at about 6am this morning and there were people already there looking at the flamingos and they were very respectful,” she said.
American flamingos have never been recorded in New York state, says ecologist José Ramírez Garofalo, a doctoral student at Rutgers University and director of the Freshkills Biological Laboratory on Staten Island.
He said Hurricane Idalia, which struck the southeastern United States in August, may have helped propel the birds north.
“The hurricane brought a huge number of flamingos across the United States,” Ramirez Garofalo told The Post. “It’s unprecedented. … We don’t have a lot of documentation of flamingos coming this far north.”
Flamingos “wintered” in the Southeast after the hurricane, so “this bird is probably one of several that wintered somewhere in the U.S.,” he predicted.
He said it was natural that the bird would stay in the pond.
“This bird is probably tired and searching for food, so it’s definitely going to stay here,” he said. “There’s plenty of food, the temperatures are just right, and there’s precedent for East Coast flamingos staying all summer.”
Blinken hopes the creature will stick around.
“Yesterday there was a crazy guy on a yacht who was trying to get close-up photos and he kept chasing away flamingos that were trying to get off his boat,” she said.
“And I thought, ‘Oh God, please don’t chase the flamingos away!'”
