The Great Westlake Flamingo Flock

If you lived in Westlake any time between about 1990 and 2012, you remember the corner. Bee Cave Road and Loop 360, where a scrubby Hill Country hillside was, for more than two decades, absolutely covered in plastic pink flamingos. A thousand of them, give or take, standing at attention alongside one of the busiest intersections in the area. Drivers slowed down for it. Tour buses detoured past it. And in 1993 it landed in front of the West Lake Hills City Council in a fight that made the national wire services. It all started with a garden shop and one customer's odd request.

Pink Flamingos

The shop was Pots & Plants, at 5902 Bee Cave Road, on the hillside corner where Bee Cave meets Loop 360. Sometime around 1990, a customer asked owner Pat Swanson for a pair of plastic pink flamingos. Nobody in Austin stocked those back then, so the shop special-ordered two pairs: one for the customer, and one just for fun, to stick out front. That "for fun" pair sold before anyone could get back inside. So they ordered ten pairs. Those sold too. Then a hundred pairs. By the time it was finished, Pots & Plants had roughly 1,000 plastic pink flamingos planted across its hillside, and Westlake had itself a landmark.

The flock developed its own seasonal rhythms. The birds migrated away each winter, and a single lone bird, the Scout Bird, would arrive about two weeks ahead of the rest, often just as the bluebonnets came in. People are said to have set up lawn chairs with binoculars to watch for it. One year an early freeze caught the shop before it had pulled the flock in for the season, so the staff leaned into it and staged a mock mass bird kill. Another year the birds got a coat of black-and-white paint and became, briefly, a herd of Holstein cows.

Over time the flock became the neighborhood's unofficial scoreboard and calendar. The birds turned out in football gear for University of Texas games, wore yellow shirts during the Tour de France, and got seasonal treatment each December while Westlake High School made its football playoff runs. There were oversized Valentine's hearts, giant Easter eggs tucked in among the birds, and a general sense that nobody on that hillside was taking themselves too seriously. None of this needed the internet, which barely existed yet. It spread the old-fashioned Austin way: word of mouth, curious drive-bys, and eventually the local press.

By 1993 the flock's fame had outgrown its patch of hillside, and a complaint reached the City of West Lake Hills. A city inspector called the shop to explain that the flamingos ran afoul of the local sign ordinance and would have to come down. According to the owners' account, the Austin American-Statesman had already been tipped off and was waiting outside when the call came in. What happened next turned a routine zoning dispute into a genuine only-in-Austin spectacle. A visitor from Houston, dressed head to toe in flamingo print, happened to be at the shop that day. Having some experience with the press, he urged the owners not to remove a single bird. He went on to found a group with the tongue-in-cheek name S.A.F.E., the Society Against Flamingo Extinction, and made sure every television station in town heard about it.

From there it went viral, decades before anyone used that word for this sort of thing. Local news broadcasts ran flamingo updates. The AP and UPI picked up the story, and it ran in papers well beyond Texas. The shop posted the city's phone and fax numbers on a sign out among the birds, and the resulting honking from passing cars reportedly made it onto NPR's Morning Edition. One Austin environmental firm is said to have submitted a mock "endangered species impact study" to the city on the flock's behalf. Residents sent flamingo-decorated cakes to City Hall, which nobody at City Hall was brave enough to eat.

When the council took the matter up on August 12, 1993, roughly 300 people turned out dressed in pink to defend the flock, several times what the meeting room could hold. The city found an exemption in its own sign ordinance for works of art, and applied it. The flamingos were recognized as local art, and they stayed.

The plastic pink flamingo was not an Austin invention. Sculptor Don Featherstone designed the original in 1957 for Union Products in Leominster, Massachusetts, reportedly working from a National Geographic photograph because there were no flamingos handy in New England. The design became one of the most recognizable objects in American yard culture, and it earned Featherstone an Ig Nobel Prize in 1996. Westlake's contribution was simply to order about a thousand of them at once.

Pots & Plants closed its Bee Cave Road shop at the end of 2010, and the property sold in 2012. What went up on the site says a lot about how this neighborhood works. The buyer was Drew Gressett, who grew up in West Lake Hills, graduated from Westlake High School in 2000, played basketball at the University of Texas, and founded Hat Creek Burger Company out of a downtown trailer in 2008. He built his flagship restaurant on the old flamingo hillside. In other words, the corner passed from one local institution to a kid who had spent his childhood driving past it.

Which is why what happened in March 2026 makes perfect sense. Both the Westlake High School girls and boys basketball teams reached the state championship finals that month, the girls arriving there with an undefeated season. To mark it, Gressett brought the flock back to the corner of Bee Cave Road and Loop 360, pink birds on the hillside once again, for a community that had not seen them there in years.

The Eanes History Center, housed in the old Rock Schoolhouse on the Eanes Elementary campus, collects photographs and stories from the flock's long run on that corner. If you have snapshots from the Scout Bird years, the cow-bird year, or any of the costumed displays, they would like to see them.

It's a small story: a garden shop, a thousand cheap plastic birds, and a zoning dispute that got out of hand in the best possible way. But it says something true about this corner of Austin. Westlake has a strong identity. Green, hilly, close to the lake, and calmer than people expect of a place ten minutes from downtown. What the flamingo saga adds to that picture is a sense of humor, and a long memory. A community that will turn out 300 strong in pink to defend a hillside full of lawn ornaments, and then bring those same birds back 33 years later to salute a couple of high school basketball teams, is a community that knows exactly what it values.

Visit these websites to read more about the Westlake flamingos, the plastic pink flamingo itself, and the history of the Westlake community:


By: Jim Olenbush