Looking into mass bird kills...they're not all that unusual.

[MineralMan]

This search wasn't so easy, since Google is full of the recent ones that have everyone all atwitter. I had to try some search phrases that didn't produce hundreds of pages about the recent ones. But, I succeeded. A Google search for "dead birds" in quotation marks, then adding a country or place name, pulls up a lot of stories from other years and places. 2007 was a big year for bird kills, with Australia, Russia, and even Texas getting some. If you keep looking at more pages, you find more instances where a bunch of birds suddenly shows up dead.

These things seem to happen around this time of year a lot, so it may be weather-related. They're relatively rare, and seldom happen twice in the same place, so it's fairly usual that an individual person or community will not have seen such a thing for at least a generation. That's news, ladies and gentlemen. So, the ones that happened in the last week made all the papers, for sure.

But, how many people remember the massive bird kill in Australia in 2007 or 2008, or the dead birds that appeared in Washington state the same year? Russia has had its cases, too, sometimes far more massive than the current ones. Dead birds shut down the city of Austin, TX in 2007, too, when a bunch were found on a main street one morning.

Thousands of ducks died unexpectedly in 2006 in Idaho. Sri Lanka in 2007 saw thousands of migratory birds drop from the sky. It rained dead starlings in New Jersey in 2009. In March of 2010, about a hundred birds fell in someone's yard in England.

It goes on and on. The longer you search, the more you find. So, is what has happened recently unique? Nope. Does it have a strange cause? Probably not. It happens. It happens every year, apparently, somewhere. I think I'll put my tinfoil hat back in the hall closet now and wait to see what actually caused the recent bird kills, once there's been time to thoroughly examine the dead birds.

[OneGrassRoot]

1. I may add the word "simultaneous" and search later...

Thanks, MineralMan. I actually do remember large-scale bird deaths, several that you mentioned, but it's the simultaneous nature of what we're seeing reported -- multiple locations within the same time period -- that seems most puzzling.

Maybe it has occurred before, I don't know....

:hi:

[freshwest]

4. I don't care why it happened. I just don't like it. And furthermore...

I'm not going to be able to do a thing about it no matter why it is.

Where's my good news story of the day?

Wait, it's a political website.

Have a good evening people, that's all I've got.

[OneGrassRoot]

6. I don't like it either...

I'm simply concerned and want to understand it more; I'd like to know if such a widespread event over a short span of time has been recorded before.

Hope you had a good evening. :hi:

[wtmusic]

2. Probably an unannounced USDA "controlled kill"

"Yes, mostly starlings; however, Redwinged Blackbirds in AR and LA are a rice crop pest.
Washington, State, 2008:

Thousands of dead birds a shock in Yakima County

"I apologize; we should have notified them," DeVries said. "The USDA did a controlled kill, but a lot of the birds fly in and fly out and they didn't know where some of them would end up.

So, why would it be a stretch to suspect the USDA Wildlife had a hand in AR and LA?

National Wildlife Research Center Scientists Address Blackbird Damage to Rice

Wildlife Services’(WS) National Wildlife Research Center (NWRC) is the only Federal research facility devoted exclusively to resolving conflicts between people and wildlife through the development of effective, selective, and acceptable methods, tools, and techniques.

Blackbirds, specifically red-winged blackbirds, common grackles, and brown-headed cowbirds, cause extensive damage to newly planted rice and ripening rice."

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/1/4/933404/-BREAKING-NEWS:-USDA-Killing-1000s-Birds-for-Years

[MineralMan]

3. Could be lots of things. The point is that it happens, here and there,

around the world every year, it seems. Interesting and unusual in a particular place, but hardly the stuff to get panicked about, I think. Weird stuff happens. It always has.

[Kali]

5. I'm sure there is a word for it, but

there is the additional matter of rapid information dissemination - more and more are in touch electronically world wide so that "gossip" factor is magnified immensely from even just a few years ago. It plays two ways - adds to the tin foil effect but also allows real info to get out quickly as well.

Back in the old days you only heard about local phenomenon unless it was a HUGE event, now there is so much time and space to fill with all kinds of data...