Old image claimed to be shot at different locations shared amidst lockdown

An image of birds like peacocks and parrots eating grains from the ground is circulating on social media. It is being claimed that the image was shot at the Ooty-Coimbatore highway. The same image has been shared with the different captions identifying the location as Ooty-Coimbatore road, BHU campus, Pune, Chandigarh, and Kolhapur. One Facebook user Jeevan Amrit posted the image with the message, “Ooty-Coimbatore roads have been occupied by original owners. Love to see this scene. Now we are understanding what damage we did to nature till now.” The post has been shared more than 4,200 times so far.

A website called Prokerala also published this photo with the claim that it was shot in the campus of Kolhapur’s Shivaji University during the nationwide lockdown.

Alt News has received several requests on its official Android application to fact-check this image.

Fact-check

Alt News performed a reverse image search of the image on the Russian search engine Yandex and found a tweet by handle @AyazBuriroPPP. The same image was posted by the handle on September 4, 2019. The user claimed the image to be from Sindh, Pakistan. Thus, it is clear that the image is at least one-year-old and not a recent one.

However, it is uncertain that the image is from Pakistan. With a Google reverse image search, we found a fact-check report by NewsMeter. According to the report, an Instagram user named Vama Amav posted the image on June 29, 2019. The user identified the image to be from Chandigarh.

However, a comparison of the image posted by the Instagram user and the viral image clearly shows that both are not the same. The sitting position of the peacocks in both images is different but the background of the location has many similarities. You can see the difference in both images in the comparison posted below.

Upon finding that the location in both images looks the same, we contacted Vama Amav on Instagram. Vama informed that while she didn’t click the viral image, the location seen in the image is Chandigarh’s Chhatbir Zoo which she has visited.

The September 2019 tweet makes it clear that the image was definitely not shot during the on-going nationwide lockdown. However, we couldn’t independently verify if the image is from Chandigarh or not. Earlier as well, an image of deers from Japan’s Nara Park was shared with the claim that they sat on the Ooty-Coimbatore highway after the lockdown was imposed in India.