On a clipped wing, flamingo escapes a British zoo for a life in France

As the weather turned cool this autumn across England, Frankie the flamingo had apparently had enough.

On a blustery Sunday morning this month, the juvenile bird vanished from the zoo in Cornwall where she was born. After a frantic six-day search to find her, Frankie’s keepers learned this past week that she had traveled roughly 130 miles away — to a beach in France.

Frankie’s journey was exceptional, her keepers said, as she is only a few months old and had a wing clipped, which should have prevented her from ever taking flight.

“Being a young bird, we were quite surprised how quickly she got to France,” said David Woolcock, a curator at the Paradise Park Wildlife Sanctuary, where Frankie lived. “But she’s feeding, she’s preening, she’s having a whale of a time by the look of it.”

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