They flew the coop — and vanished into thin air.
Bird handlers are devastated after a mind-boggling 5,000 homing pigeons seemingly disappeared during a race across the UK.
“We’ve seen one of the very worst ever racing days in our history,” pigeon hobbyist Richard Sayers wrote in a Facebook post chronicling the feathery fiasco, which occurred Saturday after 9,000 racing birds took off from Peterborough, Cambs, on a journey to the Northeast. And while the 170-mile round-trip flight should’ve only taken three hours, over half the avian competitors were still unaccounted for as of last night.
They were reportedly part of 250,000 pigeons released in approximately 50 racing events across the country — with just 10% returning on time and another tens of thousands reported missing, the Sun reported.
This meteorological event may have distorted Earth’s magnetic field, which the pigeons use to navigate like a meteorological GPS.
It’s unclear what prompted the squab squadrons to seemingly vanish into thin air. However Sayers, whose local pigeon coop reportedly lost as many as 300 birds in the flight-marish phenomenon, said most breeders are “blaming the atmospheric conditions, possibly a solar storm above the clouds that created static in the atmosphere.”