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. 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.”
