Frankie the Flamingo's Fabulous Tour de France

Photo by CraigHanson/Shutterstock.com

Frankie the flamingo has cemented her lore.

Born earlier this year at Paradise Park Wildlife Sanctuary in Hayle, Cornwall on England’s southwestern tip, the young Caribbean flamingo has made international headlines this month for her accomplishments in escapology.

At around 8 a.m. on Nov. 2, it was first discovered that Frankie was no longer in her enclosure. For a 4-month-old flamingo to figure a way out is odd enough, but zoo staff had clipped the flight feathers on Frankie's right wing, adding to the intrigue of her great escape. 

The method in which the flamingo fled remains a mystery, though there is a theory: typical young flamingo behavior mixed with coincidence. Young birds generally flap their wings and jump around, and a working theory is that a gust of wind happened to hit Frankie’s experimental wings at just the right way at the just the right moment to lift her up and out.

Regardless of how it happened, it did. For days, the zoo had no idea what happened to their flamingo, whom the sanctuary’s caretaker David Woolcock called “aloof” and “quite a character” to the New York Times. Members of the public called into the zoo with tips, all of which turned out to be dead ends.

“We were getting constant calls - ‘We found the flamingo, it’s here in this field,’” Woolcock said. “We would drive out there, and it would be (a) white stork.”

A grainy photo of Frankie flying through the English sky was the only confirmed sighting of the bird for days after her disappearance. After six days of searching, she was finally found in France.

France? Yep, France. Like, 130 miles across the English Channel, France. Frankie crossed ocean waters with a clipped wing at four months old.

Mickaël Belliot, a nature guide who lives near Brest, couldn’t believe what he was seeing: a real-life flamingo, in the flesh, in northern France’s Goulven Bay. Belliot often photographs birds in the area, but this was his first time capturing a flamingo.

“I sent some photos that same evening to my friends who didn’t believe me, they told me it was probably AI photos,” he told the BBC. “Obviously the next day when I told them about the Paradise Park post they had to believe me.”

The southern coast of France is known to house flamingos during the right time of year, but the northern coastline does not have the same reputation. Still, it appears that Frankie has settled nicely into her new-found environment.

“Being a young bird, we were quite surprised how quickly she got to France,” Woolcock explained to The New York Times. “But she’s feeding, she’s preening, she’s having a whale of a time by the look of it.”

This is especially good given the low likelihood of Frankie ever coming back to the sanctuary where she was born. Now that the United Kingdom is not in the European Union, moving wild animals across the border with France isn’t so easy. That bureaucracy, the possibility that Frankie contracted bird flu somewhere along the way, and her parent-reared upbringing, which makes her wary of humans, do not instill confidence for her return.

Frankie is one of two flamingos to ever be born at Paradise Park, and her loss is a big blow to the local zoo-goers who came to embrace the freshest flamingo face. But what’s done is done, and most of all the zoo and her fans can do now is wish her well.

“It was never our intention for Frankie to end up in the wild,” the zoo said in a release. “There are a number of reports of similar situations where flamingos have lived for many years and thrived, including over European winters, so while we will continue to worry about her, it is a position we have to accept.”

Given her state in the photos and what the zoo knows of Frankie, it is publicly displaying optimism for her future, in France or beyond.

“Flamingos are really quite hardy creatures, sometimes flying hundreds of miles to cross entire continents,” the zoo explained in the statement. “Frankie was parent-reared, so no doubt learned a lot from her parents. She was feeding independently and was a supremely fit young bird before she left the Park. All the evidence that we have seen of her in France shows a well-adjusted, well-fed bird doing extremely well.”

At this point, Frankie has been spotted multiple times on the northern French coast. Belliot alone has seen her on more than one occasion, becoming more excited with every opportunity to catch a glimpse of the flamingo fugitive.

“I was really happy to see her again,” he said to the BBC. “I will continue to monitor the area and above all I hope that she will acclimatize to her new wild life.”