These Lost Pink Flamingos Won't Survive in Siberia for Long
The flock took a wrong turn north and flew into Russia.
MOSCOW— -- A Russian fisherman has stumbled across the odd sight of a flock of pink flamingos in the freezing wilds of Siberia.
The seven birds were spotted in the Kemerovo region near the city of Novosibirsk. Pavel Shaposhnikov, a resident who had gone out fishing, filmed the birds floating down a river with snow in the background.
Temperatures in Novosibirsk are hovering around 30 degrees, falling to the mid-20s at night. The long-legged wading birds are found in a range of different climates and habitats around the world, but generally migrate away from cold weather.
It was the first time he’d ever seen flamingos in the wild, Shaposhnikov told ABC News.
The birds are thought to have gotten lost on their annual winter migration from Kazakhstan, which is home to flamingos. Normally, the birds would migrate southward toward warmer climes, but sometimes they get knocked off course and mistakenly fly north into the Russian snows, Nikolai Skalon, a zoologist at Kemerovo State University told the Russian news agency TASS.
Skalon said the birds’ only hope of surviving the cold now was if they were rescued by humans.
Flamingos in Siberia are not a totally uncommon occurrence, and are quite regularly spotted in Russia’s more southern regions where they often halt during migrations.