Thursday 10 March 2011

A Couple Of Months Ago I Mention Birds Falling From The Skies,

well some time ago it was flamingos! a pink one, admittedly some time ago, but on November 11, 2003, two boys, Kolya and Maksim Muravyev, are ice fishing along the Lena River, where it's 13 below zero, all of a sudden, up in the sky, they see what looks like a flamingo. "We thought it was a swan or a stork," Kolya says, a flamingo being so preposterously improbable, it was large, and made ever lower circles in the sky, it seemed to be losing energy until finally it fell and lay quietly on the snow, the two boys ran over, called their father, Vasily, who picked up the bird and took it home, it was still alive, "[this is the] first time I see a bird like this," he told a TV reporter, they fed the flamingo fish and buckwheat saturated in water (not normally flamingo food) and pretty soon it was up, active and knocking around the Muravyev's apartment, here it is, head in a feeding bucket, that should be the end of the story,

except that one year later, also in November and also in Siberia, it happened again, another flamingo flew out of the sky, landed by another Siberian river, where did they come from? there are Asian flamingos, the nearest live and nest in Kazakhstan, so perhaps those birds came from there, November is the month when flamingos normally fly south from their nests in Kazakhstan to Iran, so maybe this is an example of "reverse migration", 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, which where they landed was, as I have said it is old news but for me kind of weird.

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