When a Spanish fancier released his eight-month-old pigeon for its very first race, the plan was for it to fly to Majorca from Ibiza, approximately 120 kilometres over the Mediterranean Sea.

Instead, the bird ended up some 5,000 kilometres across the Atlantic Ocean on Sable Island, a remote sandbar off Nova Scotia.

Kristina Penn is used to all sorts of wildlife living on Sable Island: hundreds of wild horses, thousands of seals and numerous seabirds.

Pigeons don’t typically visit Sable Island, which is located about 290 kilometres southeast of Halifax. Penn could only recall one other time it happened, when a racing pigeon from the U.S. ended up on the island in 2017.