In April 2026, online users discussed a rumor claiming a South Carolina resident named Pam Luongo placed six decorative pink and plastic flamingos in her front walkway in March 2019. According to the story, by September she found 17 real flamingos standing in her front yard, leading officials to later designate her property as a protected habitat.
For example, on April 8, a Facebook user posted (archived) the story with an alleged photo of the plastic and real flamingos in Luongo's walkway and yard.
(Rayyan Echo/Facebook)
The story read:
Pam Luongo bought six plastic flamingos at a garage sale in March 2019. She stuck them along her front walkway in Beaufort, South Carolina, and forgot about them. By September, seventeen real flamingos were standing in her yard. Wildlife officials couldn't explain it. Caribbean flamingos hadn't nested that far north in recorded history. A biologist from Clemson set up cameras. The birds were landing at dusk, tucking their heads, and sleeping between the plastic ones like they'd found family. Pam started leaving out shallow pans of brine shrimp. By 2021, the flock hit forty-three. The Audubon Society designated her quarter-acre lot a protected habitat. She still mows around them.
One Snopes reader emailed, "I saw a Facebook post about a woman in Beaufort, South Carolina, who had plastic flamingos in her yard, and real flamingos started coming and nesting. The Audubon Society declared her lot protected habitat." Another reader asked, "Various posts on social media about a Pam Luongo setting up flamingo sculptures that were then joined by real birds until her property was designated a protected area. Is it true?"
In short, this rumor is false.
The claim and image originated in a YouTube short (archived) from April 6, posted on the Star Humanity YouTube channel. The channel features over 1,000 YouTube shorts. As of late, many of those shorts have paired fictional stories with potentially fake or altered images — both apparently generated with the help of artificial intelligence.
The YouTube channel did not feature any external contact method with which Snopes could reach out to ask questions.
Researching the flamingos rumor
Searches of Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo for Pam Luongo's name and South Carolina failed to locate any local or national news media outlets reporting on what would be an odd, potentially viral story. Those searches also found nothing about a woman named Pam Luongo residing in the state.
The Star Humanity YouTube channel's list of shorts, when sorted by "Oldest," displayed the unidentified owner's oldest video as being uploaded in August 2025. The channel's bio displayed a January 2025 creation month. Older videos appeared to showcase genuine images and stories, whereas more recent shorts appeared to exclusively featured fake content.
A reverse image search for the alleged flamingos photo (and a horizontally mirrored version of the picture) — as well as for other images appearing in the channel's recent shorts — found zero results for the same image appearing on other websites. Similarly, Google Gemini's SynthID detector said the tool did not detect Google-created content. SynthID accurately detects an invisible watermark indicating a user created a piece of media exclusively with Google's AI tools. In this situation, that was not the case. Those lack of results from the searches and scans indicated a user managing the Star Destiny account possibly generated the images with a different AI tool, such as ChatGPT or Grok.
Scans of the flamingos story's text with various AI detection tools displayed conflicting results. The tale's around 100 total words did not allow for a large sample of text for such a scan. On top of that, AI detection tools aren't an accurate method to detect AI-generated text. Snopes' past research into AI slop social media accounts — whose owners pump out a multitude of daily fabricated stories, images and videos — found no reason to believe users managing such profiles would take the time to carefully and manually write the text to achieve their goal of monetizing content.
For further reading, we previously investigated whether a photo authentically showed dozens of flamingos sheltering in a bathroom during Hurricane Andrew in 1992, as well as if a video showed a pair of flamingos feeding bright red liquid to a chick.