Baby flamingo missing from Cornwall wildlife park found living in France
A four-month-old flamingo who went missing from a wildlife park in Cornwall earlier this month has now been discovered living in France.
Frankie the flamingo, who was born in July, disappeared from a walled garden at Paradise Park in Hayle, near St Ives, on Sunday morning (November 2) despite having a feather clipped to one of his wings.
After more than a week of worrying for his keepers, photos taken in Tréflez, Brittany, reveal that Frankie has flown south and reached northern France.
Nick Reynolds, manager of Paradise Park, said: Independent: “We saw it at 7.30 in the morning. Then at 8.30 in the morning I got a call saying ‘we can’t find the flamingo’ and when I returned to the park I found that it wasn’t there and we had no idea where it was.”
“We were pretty sure it was flying, in fact it couldn’t have been any other scenario. It was inside our walled garden, which has a 12-metre wall and aviaries built against it. So it pulled itself up and got to the top of that, which was pretty amazing.”
Mr Reynolds said instead of tying the birds to the park’s wings, meaning they would be permanently unable to fly, the feathers were clipped instead, but in this case Frankie’s mature feathers grew faster than expected.
“We just clip the wing. You clip a wing and then of course [for young birds] The feathers naturally fall out and new ones grow back. When they start to regrow they are in a ‘blood feather’ state so the feather has blood in it to grow the feather so you have to be careful; you can’t cut them too early or you’ll cut off the blood feather.
“So he raised them and got some support, and then he went out with the wind we had last week.”
After he escaped from the park, there were numerous images of him flying away.
“We’ve seen it many times here locally,” Mr Reynolds said. “Then some photos came out and showed a flamingo in France. New photos just came in, they’re amazing and we can definitely see the wing that we clipped, so we can definitely identify it as Frankie 100 percent.”
Although he was “devastated” to go, Mr Reynolds said he would not return unless he decided to fly home himself.
“The logistics of getting him back here are a non-starter,” he said. “First of all, you have to catch him in France. Secondly, we have to get the French to allow him to be taken to a quarantine facility and quarantined for 30 days. Then you have to get export permits, import permits, health certificates, quarantine him.” [in the UK] When he returns to the park for 30 days, there will be another 30 days of quarantine here after the external quarantine.
“It’s now classed as a wild bird and given the bird flu situation at the moment, will the French allow all this? We don’t think they will. If we had the chance to do it, then yes, we would try it.”
“It would have been easier if he had flown back to England,” he said, adding that the chances of that happening were “slim because he was heading south and doing what he would naturally do.”
“Personally, I’m sad too, our whole team is sad too. We’re not giving up on him and we still want photos, let’s see what happens.”
