All eyes were focussed on the western area of Road Pond, Sandy Ground, Anguilla, where village residents, and other persons travelling there, claimed a large pink flamingo arrived on the island on Saturday, October 31, for the first time.
One of the residents, Ms. Anne Edwards, a retired secondary school educator, operating Sydans Villa and Apartments, off the western bank of the pond, called The Anguillian to record the visit of “the tourist”. She told the newspaper:
“This is the first time to my knowledge – and I am up in my 60s – that I have seen a flamingo in Anguilla. I’ve been to Trinidad and I went to the swamps and saw the flamingos there. I have been to The Bahamas and Cuba and I have seen them there also; but I have never seen a pink flamingo in Anguilla. I thought it was good and exciting and I felt I should call you to take a picture. I also called my past students, Rita Carty, Haydn [Hughes], and a couple of other people, and told them ‘come on down to Sandy Ground and see this flamingo’.
“I also called them because I knew that as soon as the noise accumulated and the children probably want to interfere with the flamingo, it would go because Anguilla is not its natural habitat. I just happened to be driving across the road when I saw it. There was a guy in a black car parked there. I told him: ‘This is something that you have to really look at’ and he said he had never seen it in Anguilla before either – and a lot of people live near the ponds. ”
Asked where she thought the bird came from, she replied: “With climate change and other things, I think it got off-course. I don’t know if flamingos are in St. Kitts, and I don’t think they are in St. Martin/St. Maarten. I have been living in Barbados but I have never seen a pink flamingo there…I don’t know if it has white or whatever colour of flamingos, but I know everybody goes crazy over them. When I visited the swamps in Trinidad, flamingos were there in the trees and elsewhere in abundance. When one is seen in Anguilla – it depends on what they are looking for. Things are happening so fast – the islands are changing and people are interfering with natural habitats all over the world.”
Wikipedia gives the following information in part: “There are four flamingo species in the Americas and Afro-Eurasia. Often, they are pink in colour”.
