Peaches was apparently making his regular migration to Cuba from his home on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula when Hurricane Idalia knocked his flight off its path.
Peaches is a flamingo also known to researchers as US02 — the band he was tagged with in Pinellas County in 2023 following his unintended detour.
Fishermen found him floating in the Gulf, waterlogged and exhausted after Idalia, but was nursed back to health and named Peaches by a Seaside Seabird Sanctuary team.
Before his release, Audubon Florida's state director of research, Jerry Lorenz, tagged him with a blue leg band and Zoo Miami's Frank Ridgley attached a solar-powered tracker.
At the time, researchers wanted to see whether Peaches would settle in Florida or head home.
READ MORE: Hurricane Idalia pushed flamingos up the East Coast. Some people hope they'll stay
The tracker, a device Lorenz called "very fickle," failed a few days later, and researchers lost track of Peaches.
But, in May, he was spotted raising a flaminglet on the Yucatan Peninsula, which Lorenz suspects is his home.
Why were they off course?
While Peaches may have left Florida, a February 2024 survey led by Lorenz spotted over 100 of his fellow dislocated pink wading birds still scattered across the state.
Lorenz said there are several theories as to how the birds ended up so far off course. He thinks the most likely theory is 400 to 600 members of Peaches' flamboyance took advantage of Idalia's northern winds to vacation in Florida instead of Cuba.
After Idalia, flamingos were spotted as far north as the Great Lakes.
The largest flamboyance in Florida, of over 60 flamingos, was spotted in Florida Bay at the southern tip of the peninsula. More groups were observed near Pine Island in Lee County and Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge in Brevard County.
READ MORE: Displaced by Hurricane Idalia, flamingos land in Florida
Other theories have the group caught in the eye of the hurricane or swept up in its outer wind bands.
Researchers had hoped these "storm birds" would stay in Florida to revive the state's flamingo population.
Once a thriving species
One of the largest flamingo species, the American flamingo, nested in Florida until the turn of the 20th century, when the feather trade decimated the population. At the time, feathers were worth more than gold and the market for flamingo meat, considered a delicacy since ancient Rome, was booming.
In 1918, flamingos gained protection under the U.S. Migratory Bird Act, but it was too late. The birds were virtually nonexistent in Florida in the 1950s, but their population has been slowly trending upward since then.
"Now we're seeing them fairly regularly," Lorenz said. "So they've recovered, and they're repopulating their entire range, which includes southern Florida."
To help bolster the growing population in Florida, Lorenz said the Flamingo Working Group, which contributed to the 2024 survey, is considering stimulating flamingo nesting.
If the team can get permits and funding, it could build mud nests for the birds in the next year or two.
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