Fact check: Video of Dead Goose birds frozen into the water is not from China

A video of hundreds of dead water birds frozen in a river has gone viral on social media, with some users claiming that it was filmed in China, where the temperature suddenly dropped by 45 degrees Celsius. However, this claim is false, as the video is actually from South Dakota, USA, where a mass die-off of snow geese occurred in early December 2023, due to avian influenza.

Video of Dead Goose birds frozen

The video was shared by a Chinese journalist named Jennifer Zeng on X (formerly Twitter), with the caption: “Today, the temperature in some regions in #Xinjiang suddenly dropped to -52℃ ( (-61.6℉) (a sharp drop of 45 degrees), and waterfowl died off in large numbers. What happened with global warming?

The video was also picked up by Aaj Tak, a Hindi news channel in India, which reported on February 20, 2024, that China’s Xinjiang region witnessed its harshest winter in over six decades, with temperatures plummeting to minus 52.3 degrees Celsius, breaking a 64-year-old record. The report claimed that the video showed the frozen river and the dead birds in Xinjiang, and also mentioned the sandstorm and the snowfall that hit the region.

Fact check

However, both the tweet and the report are misleading and inaccurate, as the video is not from China, but from South Dakota, USA, where a mass die-off of snow geese occurred in early December 2023, due to avian influenza. The video was filmed by an ice fisherman named Nate Phinney on February 9, 2024, and posted on his Facebook page.

Phinney’s friend, Sean Weaver, a waterfowler and an Instagram influencer, posted the video on his account, where it got over 2.4 million views. Weaver explained that these birds, mostly juvenile snows, probably died around December and have been stuck in the ice for months. He said that this was not an isolated incident and that dozens, if not hundreds, of lakes in eastern South Dakota had dead snow geese on them in early December.

Nate Phinney told Outdoor Life that he found some 1,000 to 1,500 dead snow geese piled up and frozen into the lake’s surface. He said that the die-offs from avian influenza have left lots of dead geese scattered across the state, but they were usually covered by snow. However, this year, there was no snow and the lakes thawed back out in early December, creating the shocking scene.

Therefore, the claim that China’s temperature suddenly dropped by 45 degrees and killed hundreds of water birds is false. The video is from South Dakota, USA, and the birds died from avian influenza, not from extreme cold. The temperature in China’s Xinjiang region did not break any record, and the report by Aaj Tak is inaccurate and misleading.

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