Lightning is wild and handsome, but also very risky – especially to reindeer, it seems.
Advertisement
During the weekend, the agency released startling images showing a mass of reindeer carcasses scattered across a small area on the Hardangervidda mountain plateau.
Kjartan Knutsen, a spokesperson for the Norwegian Environment Agency, said that “the scale of the wildlife deaths was unprecedented in the country”, adding, “We have no heard about such numbers before”.
According to BNO news, Elin Fosshaug Olsø, a spokeswoman for the Norwegian Environment Agency said that they found 323 dead reindeer, of which 5 had to be put down due to injuries, in a radius of 50 meters.
So how could something like this happen?
The fact that the ground would have been soggy from all the rain that day also meant that it would have been a very good conductor for all that branching ground current.
And not only did the herd’s instinct to huddle together backfire on them, their own bodies rendered them the flawless receptacles for all that electricity.
Some experts are saying they believe this to be the largest number of animals killed by lightning ever recorded.
But if it stretches out a leg or a wing, or touches another wire, the current suddenly has somewhere to go, and through the bird it zips. Although it is not certain how the reindeer died, the Inspectorate believes that an unusually high electrical discharge interacted with the storm’s highly conductive torrential rain and electrocuted them. Satellite data from NASA’s Global Hydrology Research Center show that in an average year, southern Norway sees fewer than one lightning strike per square kilometer.
Advertisement
“It’s part of the natural ecology, this is far from where people live”, Knutsen said.
