Santa’s nightmare happened in Norway this weekend when a wayward lightning strike killed 323 reindeer.
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The animals were discovered over the weekend by the Norwegian Environmental Agency over the weekend. Of the 323 dead, five reindeer had to be euthanized by the SNO. There are some 25,000 wild tundra reindeer in Norway, located in the southern mountain ranges, according to experts.
Although mass deaths like this are unlikely, it’s surprisingly not uncommon for herds of cattle and deer to be killed by lightning strikes. Wildlife officials are calling it an unusually large natural disaster. Nylend said a team of eight took samples that will be researched at the Norwegian Veterinary Institute. Aerial footage shows reindeer carcasses scattered across a small area on the Hardangervidda mountain plateau.
“The energy then spreads along the ground surface, and if you’re anywhere near that lightning strike, you absorb it and get shocked”. Reindeer are known to crowd together during storms, which could explain why so many died at once.
“We’ve never had anything like this with lightning”, Kjartan Knutsen of Norway’s nature surveillance agency said, adding there were sometimes isolated cases of sheep or reindeer struck down.
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“We know they were killed by lightning, but this testing is for science”, he said. “The herd was probably struck dead by lightning”, said Knut Nylend of the Norwegian Nature Protectorate. The reserve chose to “let nature take its course”, according to a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service account – and against the odds, the bison’s tale had a happy ending.
