Flamingos in Siberia?
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Illustration by Maggie Starbard/NPR |
Yup. Flamingos have been turning up in Siberia for the past few years. Every November. The dead of winter.
Well, not flamingo
s. Actually, just one at a time.
What? If that's not the strangest thing I've ever heard...
Well, it's not that strange actually. Robert Krulwich, NPR's science expert, and his go-to-super-sleuth, Ezra Block explain:
Checking the library, we discovered that 100 years ago scientists also reported multiple sightings of flamingos, again deep in Siberia, and again it was November.
But where did they come from? There are Asian flamingos. The nearest live and nest in Kazakhstan, so perhaps those birds came from there. And November is the month when Asian flamingos normally fly south from their nests in Kazakhstan to Iran.
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Flamingo sightings in Kazakhstan and Siberian Russia | |
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So here's the idea.
Suppose a bird is wired to fly one direction every fall and for some reason the wiring screws up so the animal goes 180 degrees the wrong way, exactly the opposite direction. This happens to a few birds in migrant populations every year.
And thus, we end up with one very cold and very lost migratory mutant.
So far, the flamingos that find themselves in the snow in Siberia have been adopted by local zoos. So don't worry too much about flamingos with frostbite.
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