“We are not familiar with any previous happening on such a scale,” Kjartan Knutsen, an official at the Nature Inspectorate, part of the Norwegian Environment Agency, said in a phone interview on Monday. “Individual animals do from time to time get killed by lightning, and there are incidents where sheep have been killed in groups of 10 or even 20, but we have never seen anything like this.”
“Reindeer often huddle together in groups during thunderstorms,” Mr. Knutsen said. “It is a strategy they have to survive, but in this case their survival strategy might have cost them their life. The corpses are all lying in one big group, piled together.”
