This is Bird Note.

No human dreams of relaxing on the shores of Novaya Zemlya.

It's an isolated group of islands in the Arctic Ocean, north of Russia,

that's best known as a Soviet testing site for nuclear weapons.

Yet a growing flock of pink-footed geese have begun to make this militarized zone their summer home.

Pink-footed geese spend the winter in the British Isles and Western Europe.

The UK population migrates to Iceland and Greenland, but the rest breed exclusively on the Norwegian island of Svalbard.

Or at least they used to.

In 2018 and 19, researchers attach GPS trackers to 21 pink-footed geese in Finland.

To their surprise, half of them turned up on the Russian islands, roughly 600 miles east of Svalbard.

This region was once too cold for the geese to raise young.

But climate change and increased competition for food may have made Novaya Zemlya a compelling alternative.

Researchers suspect, though, that these geese didn't stumble upon this new migration route on their own.

Pink-footed geese sometimes mingle with taiga bean geese, a species that visits Novaya Zemlya when it's time to molt each spring.

It's possible that the pink-footed geese followed their lead, which could prove to be a rare

example of cultural knowledge being transmitted between species. Birds of a feather, indeed.

For bird note, I'm Michael Stein.