No, Kenyan authorities are not flying an Osprey bird carcass back to Finland for burial

  • This article is more than one year old.
  • Published on February 3, 2020 at 14:10
  • 2 min read
  • By Mary KULUNDU, AFP Kenya

Copyright © AFP 2017-2025. Any commercial use of this content requires a subscription. Click here to find out more.

A migratory Osprey bird that flew over 4,000 miles from Finland to southwestern Kenya received widespread media coverage at the end of January 2020, then died shortly afterwards. An article claiming that the Kenyan government is planning to fly the carcass back to Finland at a cost of  10 million Kenyan shillings (equivalent to nearly 90,000 euros) has since circulated widely online. However, this is false; the Kenya Wildlife Service said its veterinarians have disposed of the remains.

The article, which we've archived here but has since been taken offline, claimed that the Kenyan government planned to spend 10 million Kenyan shillings (equivalent to nearly 90,000 euros) to transport the bird’s carcass back to Finland.

Screenshot taken on February 3, 2020

It has received more than 5,000 interactions in total on social media, according to the monitoring platform Crowdtangle. It was shared on multiple Facebook pages, some of which have hundreds of thousands of followers.

Screenshot taken on February 3, 2020 of CrowdTangle data showing how widely the claims have circulated

In an official statement released on January 23, 2020, the Kenya Wildlife Service confirmed that it had rescued an Osprey bird that had migrated from Helsinki, Finland to Siaya County, located in southwestern Kenya. A reference ring on the bird’s leg indicated its provenance.

After it died a few days later, the state wildlife organisation released another statement on January 27, 2020. The Kenya Wildlife Service described the bird’s cause of death as “long term starvation which precipitated systemic organs failure”.

The misleading article about the bird’s burial was also shared multiple times on Twitter here, here and here.

In the comments, some online users expressed disbelief that the government could allocate a huge amount of money for such a purpose, while others wondered why the carcass could not be disposed of in Kenya. But some dismissed the claim as false.

Paul Udoto, a communication official at the Kenya Wildlife Service, told AFP that the claims were inaccurate, explaining that the carcass was disposed of in Nairobi on January 26, 2020, and that the Finnish authorities had been informed.

“Fake news. Carcass already disposed of. Information shared with the Finnish authorities. It was disposed of on Sunday in Nairobi by the KWS veterinarians and the Raptor Rehabilitation Centre experts,” Udoto told AFP via a Twitter message.

Udoto was among the online users who shared the misleading article. When asked why he did so, he replied: “for fun to show how creative Kenyans are [at] creating false narratives”.

Is there content that you would like AFP to fact-check? Get in touch.

Contact us

Next article Previous article