On a clipped wing, flamingo escapes British zoo for a life in France
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Frankie, a four-month-old Caribbean flamingo, at Paradise Park Wildlife Sanctuary in Cornwall, England, before she made her escape to France.
PHOTO: NYTIMES
Jonathan Wolfe
CORNWALL, England – As the weather turned cool this autumn across England, Frankie the flamingo had apparently had enough.
The juvenile bird vanished in November from the zoo in Cornwall where she was born. After a frantic six-day search to find her, Frankie’s keepers learnt this past week that she had travelled roughly 209km away – to a beach in France.
Frankie’s journey is exceptional, her keepers said, as she is only a few months old and has a wing clipped, which should have prevented her from ever taking flight.
Mr David Woolcock, a curator at the Paradise Park Wildlife Sanctuary, where Frankie lived, said “we were quite surprised how quickly she got to France”.
“But she’s feeding, she’s preening, she’s having a whale of a time by the look of it,” he added.
Frankie, a four-month-old Caribbean flamingo, left the zoo at around 8am on Nov 2, when a staff member noticed she was missing from her flock.
Clipping a bird’s wing can prevent it from taking flight, Mr Woolcock said, but it does not prevent the bird from flying once airborne.
After she was reported missing, the zoo contacted local news media, asking for the public’s help in finding her.
A breakthrough came on Nov 9, when a sighting appeared on a French citizen science portal: a flamingo on the Ile Aganton, an island on the north coast of France. A pair of images of a flamingo along the coast at Plage de Keremma, about 48km away, were forwarded to the zoo.
The bird had its right wing clipped, just like Frankie.
The sighting on Ile Aganton was made on Nov 3, shortly before 10am, which means Frankie could have made it to France in less than a day.
Now that she is there, the zoo said it is unlikely that it will be able to bring her home.
Britain’s departure from the European Union has made it difficult to move wild animals across the British-French border.
An extra complication, Mr Woolcock said, is the risk that Frankie may have contracted bird flu on her travels.
In the meantime, he said, he is heartened that she has found somewhere suitable to live, which should allow her “to grow a little bit more mature – and hopefully find a partner”. NYTIMES
