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| - Fact Check: This video of snow geese frozen over a lake is NOT from China
India Today found that this incident happened in South Dakota, US.
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India Today Fact Check
This video is not from China but from South Dakota in the US.
Around the middle of February, parts of China experienced its harshest cold in more than six decades. According to reports, temperatures dived to negative 52.3 degrees Celsius in China's Xinjiang region around February 18. In its aftermath, a video of hundreds of dead birds lying on a frozen lake was widely shared on social media. Allegedly, the video showed waterfowl that froze to death in a lake in Xinjiang.
A Facebook user wrote: “Large numbers of waterfowl died off due to the temperature suddenly dropped to -52âă in some regions in Xinjiang, China.” Its archive can be seen here.
India Today found that the video shows snow geese found over a frozen lake in South Dakota, US.
Our Probe
Several people reacting to the video on X claimed that this incident was from South Dakota. A subsequent keyword search led us to the video shared on Instagram by photographer Sean Weaver on February 18. Weaver wrote in the video’s caption that it was recorded by his friend Nate in South Dakota.
The February 18 post’s caption also noted: “These birds are from a die-off two months ago. The video was recorded two days ago and was the worst die-off I had seen.”
Further searches led us to the publication Outdoor Life which had reported this incident. The publication spoke to Weaver’s friend Nate Phinney, who shot the video. Phinney said that he came across the dead snow geese when he went for ice fishing near a lake in South Dakota. He said: “Usually, those geese would be spread out all over the lake, and you wouldn’t see them until spring because they’d be covered up by snow.”
He further explained that avian influenza during recent migrations left lots of dead geese scattered across the state, adding, “Except we don’t have any snow this year, and the lakes sort of thawed back out in early December, so you get that effect of windrows of dead geese on one side of the lake. It’s kind of a shock.”
Weaver, on the other hand, told Outdoor Life that these birds probably died during December and had been stuck in the ice for months. “I recorded several lakes in early December with huge die-offs like this. There were dozens if not hundreds of lakes in eastern South Dakota that had dead snow geese on them in early December,” he said.
Previously, both India Today and Aaj Tak had misattributed this video to the cold spell in Xinjiang, China. This error has since been rectified.
Notably, we found no credible news reports about birds flash-freezing in China’s Xinjiang region because of the cold weather. Thus, it’s clear that this video has nothing to do with China at all.
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