The Rare Bird Review

The pieces of the puzzle surrounding the disappearance of White Lake near Bolotnikovo in central Russia seem to be coming together now. Two weeks ago the lake disappeared overnight.

Fyodor Dobryakov was the first to see it — or not see it, as it were. The 74-year-old headed down to the lake early one morning two weeks ago, expecting to see the first fish emerging after the spring melt. Instead, all he saw was a narrow crust of ice clinging to the shore. Everything else was gone, or almost gone.

"The ice was just hanging over an empty lake. I heard a noise, and when I looked right, I saw there was an abyss, and the water was rushing into the abyss like mad. The trees were falling into the lake and getting sucked in too," Dobryakov said at his home in this small village of pensioners, about 240 miles east of Moscow near the Oka River" Dobryakov rushed back to the village and grabbed a friend. "I told him, 'The lake's collapsed, the water's gone.' My friend said, 'You're lying.' I said, 'Of course I'm a liar, but not this time.' "

Officials are now theorizing that the soil shifted beneath the lake and opened a hole into an underground cavern and the lake and everything in it was gone. Eventuaally the water drained into the nearby Oka River through an underground channel. Among the things missing were 35 pound carp that inhabited the lake. Now fishermen are catching carp that size in the river, and the species was unknown in the Oka until two weeks ago.

To give further credence to that theory women in the village who routinely did their laundry in the lake report that occasionally a shirt would float away from them and be found a week later in the river. Locals had always attributed this to the work of elves and just lived with inconvenience.

The folks on the godldlike forums like the elf theory, and like the pelicans from North Dakota, some assume that elves or aliens, or both, transported the carp to the river. The pelicans, of course, turned out to be borrowed instead of stolen, as most have returned to their normal breeding paterns in North Dakota this spring.

"This is God's judgment. God said all those who destroy the Earth will be thrown into a lake full of flames," said Sergei Zimin, who arrived Thursday from the village of Filinskoye, a few miles away.

A few problems remain in the area. Among them are rotting fish that weren't sucked into the hole, an abundance of black flies and other undesireable critters feasting on said fish, and an almost total lack of laundry and bathing facilities.