A Scarlet Ibis in a Borrowed Nest

     Florida is a strange place, full of stories.  I know California has its share of stories too, but Florida's stories seem different, dark, lush, slightly fetid, decay and nourishment all mixed together in a kind of primordial ooze from which life emerges, sometimes recognizable life but so often not.  Perhaps that's why every day here starts and ends like an aging beauty, full of stories about her her triumphs and tragedies, all of it a little unreal, sound and fury signifying nothing.

     Florida is a little-bit touched, not quite right in the head.  She doesn't make much sense, at least not in any ordinary way.  You constantly find yourself thinking, "Why that's just crazy," and it is, but it's Florida too.  She's generous that way, pretty much accepting of anything and everything.  If you want to sell swamp land for tract homes, why go ahead.  Florida won't judge you.  She'll support you for 30 years and even when the law lowers the boom, Florida will help you find the wiggle room to get out and sell more.  An exotic, invasive species?  Why Florida really loves you.  Burmese pythons grow so large and are so prevalent here, destroying the native species, they have python round-ups.  Yeah, Florida plays both sides of the fence and you can't really get mad at her for doing it.  It's just how she rolls.

    I've been collecting Florida stories.  I'm making my own worded Cabinet of Curiosities.  She's definitely got her share of marvels and monstrosities.  My most recent discovery fits into the natural history category.  Often on my way to work I have been startled and thrilled by flocks of white and pink Ibis grazing on the neighborhood lawns near my school.  The American White Ibis can be found from the mid-Atlantic through the Gulf Coast.  It's a common sight.  The Pink Ibis though, I was told, is a native to Florida, which is true enough, I suppose.  They're my favorite, the Florida Pink Ibis, the softest pink, sometimes salmon-colored, wandering the green lawns like tiny bits of sunrise fallen to earth.  So imagine my surprise to find out that the Florida Pink Ibis is not a true species.  It's a hybrid, the result of a sixties experiment, you know the kind, senseless, a little crazy, a little cruel.  In this experiment, Scarlet Ibis eggs were placed in the nests of American White Ibis of Hialeah Park to foster.  The goal was to see if they'd be fostered, which they did.  They also mated with their foster families and from this, the Florida Pink Ibis was born.

     It doesn't really change how I feel about the Pink Ibis, that it's nearly as manmade as the infamous plastic pink flamingo.  It does, however, make me ponder a locale where such stories are commonplace, not even the worst of it.  The first story the week when we arrived in Florida was a homeless man eating half the face off another homeless man.  The eater was shot by police, the eat-ee lived, and found himself not off the streets with a new apartment, a job, but with a court-side seat at a Miami Heat play-off game.  Now that's a gloriously horrible Florida story.  The adopted Scarlet Ibis?  Why they're just one more transplant who have made their way to Florida and she does what Florida always does, wraps her arms around them and welcomes them home.