What do you think of when you think about flamingos?
Maybe it’s wet, tropical heat, visions of marshland, shrimp (mmm, shrimp!), or just those awful decorations on people’s lawns. All in all, it’s safe to assume that the very last thing you would think of is…snow?
It sounds like the beginning of a Michael Crichton book: a couple of boys were ice fishing in Siberia (yes, Siberia) during a snow storm when a flamingo fell out of the sky a few feet away from them. Luckily, the creature was unharmed, just really, really cold. They took him home, warmed him up and fed him fish and buckwheat out of a bucket, then shipped him off to a zoo where he still lives today.
So, just a freaky, once-in-a-hundred-years event right? Sure, except that it happened AGAIN a year later: another flamingo was found by locals near a Siberian river, still alive but shivering cold!
What’s going on here? Is it global warming? Is it someone’s pet(s) that keep getting loose? Is there some kind of freaky secret Siberian government funded laboratory where they are creating genetically enhanced super-flamingos? Well, maybe, but there’s a much more plausible solution.
Everyone knows that there are several bird species that migrate during the winter months to a warmer climate. Unfortunately, the mechanism behind migration is not yet well understood. Current thinking believes that the birds use visual cues and also the magnetism of the earth to guide them to their destinations every year, and some scientists even believe that birds can visibly see the magnetic field as they go.
The system is obviously quite sophisticated, and some say it is so accurate that you can predict to the day when a flock will return (though you can’t, not really). But sometimes, something goes wrong. Occasionally, the birds will end up in the wrong places, as if they’ve gotten turned around. Basically, when this happens, they fly in the exact (as in 180 degrees) wrong direction from where they want to go, and end up in an even colder climate which inevitably kills off much of a flock. This is called “reverse migration” and has been reported in small birds such as warblers, but not flamingos. However, this particular species of flamingo is known to nest in Kazakhstan and winter in Iran. The town in Siberia where the first flamingo ended up is, yup, exactly 180 degrees opposite from where it was supposed to be, near the Caspian Sea. And since flamingos are social birds, it’s possible that there was a whole flock up in Siberia that all died off from exposure and the ones that were found were just the lucky survivors.
Awesome! Makes perfect sense right?
Well, after a little digging, maybe not. You see, there is a significant dearth of information on the subject of reverse migration, little more than the spartan Wikipedia article and a handful (if that) of scholarly papers that I can’t even read without a subscription. Because of this, I have to wonder how accepted this theory is by the ornithological community. What if the birds were just blown off course by a big storm? Or even just strong winds up in the stratosphere? There just doesn’t seem like enough evidence to support this complicated hypothesis, which makes me highly suspicious of the claim. Who’s to say these aren’t some pink-o-commie flamingos on their way back to the Motherland with secret plankton intel? All I can say is, if I told you, I’d have to krill you! (I’m here all week folks!)
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