A four-month-old flamingo that went missing earlier this month from a wildlife park in Cornwall has now been discovered living in France.
Frankie the flamingo, who was born in July, went missing from a walled garden at Paradise Park in Hayle, near St Ives, during the morning of Sunday 2 November, despite having her feathers clipped on one of her wings.
After more than a week of worry for her keepers, photographs taken in Tréflez, Brittany, reveal Frankie has flown south and has made it to northern France.
Nick Reynolds, director of Paradise Park, told The Independent: “We saw her 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 I came back to the park to find she wasn’t there and we had no idea where she was.”
“We were pretty certain she’d flown out, there couldn’t have been any other scenarios really. She was inside our walled garden which has a 12-foot wall and aviaries built against that. So she’s got herself up and over the top of that, which is quite surprising.”
Mr Reynolds said that instead of pinioning the birds at the park’s wings, which means they are permanently unable to fly, instead the feathers are clipped, but in this case, Frankie’s maturing feathers grew more quickly than anticipated.
“We just clip the wing. You clip one wing, and then obviously [for young birds] the feathers naturally fall out and new ones grow back. When they start growing back, they are in ‘blood quill’, so they have blood in the quill to grow the feather, so you have to be careful – you can’t cut them too early, or you’ll cut the blood quill.
“So she’s grown them out, and got a bit of lift, and then she’s gone out on the bit of wind we had last week.”
After she escaped the park, there were numerous sightings of her flying away.
“We had many spottings of her locally down here,” Mr Reynolds said. “Then some pictures came up and showed a flamingo in France. We’ve just had some new ones come in which are fantastic and we can definitely see the wing that we clipped, so we can definitely 100 per cent identify it as being Frankie.”
Despite being “devastated” that she is gone, Mr Reynolds said it looks like she won’t be coming back unless she decides to fly home herself.
“The logistics of getting her back here would just be a non-starter,” he said. “Firstly you’ve got to catch her in France. Secondly we’d have to get the French to allow her to be taken into a quarantine facility and quarantined for 30 days. Then you’d have to get export permits and import permits, health certificates, quarantine her [in the UK] for 30 days and then when she’d got back to the park, after the external quarantine, it’s another 30 days quarantine here.
“She’s now classed as a wild bird, and with the bird flu situation at the moment, will the French allow all that? We don’t think they will. If there was a chance we could do it, then yes, we would try.
“If she flew back to England it’d be easier,” he said, adding that chances of that happening were “slim, because she’s heading south, doing what she naturally would have done”.
“I am upset personally, and all of our team are upset about it. We’re not giving up on her and we’re still asking for photographs, so we can see what’s going on.”
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