Saturday, January 1, 2011
Environment Blackbirds dead, not singing, in the night
Posted by Max Brantley on Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 2:51 PM
The state Game and Fish Commission reports more than a thousand blackbirds fell dead from the sky over Beebe on New Year's Eve. Theories include high-altitude hail, lightning or stress from being startled from roosts by fireworks,
"... into the light of a dark, black night."
GAME AND FISH COMMISSION NEWS RELEASE
Last night, ringing in the New Year took on a whole different meaning for the citizens of Beebe. Beginning at around 11:30 p.m., enforcement officers with Arkansas Game and Fish Commission began getting reports of dead black birds falling from the sky in the city limits of Beebe.
Officers estimated that over 1,000 birds had fallen out of the sky over the city before midnight. Most of the birds were dead, but some were still alive when officers arrived. The blackbirds fell over a one-mile area in the city. AGFC wildlife officer Robby King responded to the reports and found hundreds of birds. “Shortly after I arrived there were still birds falling from the sky,” King said. King collected about 65 dead birds that will be sent to the Arkansas Livestock and Poultry Commission lab and the National Wildlife Health Center lab in Madison, Wis.
The AGFC has flown over the area to gauge the scope of the event. There were no other birds found outside of the initial area.
AGFC ornithologist Karen Rowe said that strange events similar to this one have occurred a number of times across the globe. “Test results usually were inconclusive, but the birds showed physical trauma and that the flock could have been hit by lightning or high-altitude hail,” Rowe said.
Another scenario may have been that New Year’s Eve revelers shooting off fireworks in the area may have startled the birds from their roost. The birds may have died from stress.
Rowe said that it didn’t appear as though the birds died of any poisoning or other event. “Since it only involved a flock of blackbirds and only involved them falling out of the sky it is unlikely they were poisoned, but a necropsy is the only way to determine if the birds died from trauma or toxin,” she said. Testing will begin on Monday.
The City of Beebe has hired U.S. Environmental Services to begin the cleanup and dispose of the dead birds. The environmental firm will go door-to-door to pick up the birds that are still in yards and on roof tops.
Comments (30)
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"Another scenario may have been that New Year’s Eve revelers shooting off fireworks in the area may have startled the birds from their roost. The birds may have died from stress."
Uh, no.
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It's probably God's judgement for the repeal of DADT. It's an omen of what's to come! Panic in the streets!
No one knew of the danger Obamacare held for squawking flocks of starlings until the flocks gave up over Beebe to avoid the coming death panels! . . .
I don't understand, Spunkrat. If God hates the gays, shouldn't he want them to become cannon fodder? But God could be behind the dead birds. If I remember correctly, Noah sent a black bird out from the Ark to see if there was someplace to tie up the boat for shore leave. I think that's probably what's going on--after the storm, various black birds were sent out to find a place to rest, and finding none, fell dead from the sky. It makes as much sense as anything else in the Bible.
We live in a bird flight path. From the looks of my car last week seems like 100,000 flew over it in a short time.
Hey, how about all the dead drum discovered last week in a 20-mile stretch of the Arkansas River between Ozark and Clarksville? G&F thinks maybe a disease of some kind got ‘em, but doesn’t know for sure. Me? I’m thinkin’ maybe Tina and her wonder dogs have been up to something.
http://tiny.cc/axw1u
It had nothing to do with the storms. There was NO high altitude hail OR lightning in the area at the time these birds started dropping from the sky. I'm not buying in to the firework and stress theory either as it makes no sense why this didn't happen elsewhere around the US, since fireworks are abound everywhere on New Year's Eve. Beyond that, how in the world can anyone cite blunt force trauma before the fact on the carcasses when the trauma of plummeting from the sky and hitting the earth, in and of itself, would CAUSE BLUNT FORCE TRAUMA. Something is truly awry here.
Amen, yjhy1. Amen. The Theorizing Analytics of this group oft sucks the oxygen out of the ether and the ozone and now it seems, the biosphere, and that is as plausible a cause as any that has been and will be developed by this teapot clique until the next tempest comes along. Amen.
I drove in from Memphis about noon and they had a bunch extra blackbirds over by Brinkley and Carlylse.
They also a couple hundred thou extra Candian geese that Beebe could have.
I've been around long enough to know a government cover story when I see one.
There are two plausible reasons for the redwing massacre:
1) Those vapor trails Art Bell warned us about really are toxic.
2) They got too close to some UFOs. There's your "blunt force."
(Display sarcasm icon here)
Wow haha... These are wack but keen eye... I would say from the looks of everything your on the right track with your theory. That's exactly what I was thinking.
We need to understand that these dead birds are red-winged blackbirds, not the generic "blackbird" which are mostly starlings. Red-wings are native and found around water, ricefields, and wetlands. Blackbirds/grackles/starlings are an invasive European species which flock in the kurgillions during our Winters. They love anything evergreen to roost in such as pines, bamboo, southern magnolia, american holly. A dead flock of starlings should be cheered. A dead flock of red-wings is cause for concern.
Could this possibly have anything to do with the Beebe landfill's status as a Superfund site? I don't know the specifics on any of that, so maybe someone else could elaborate.
Max, do you know anything of that?
The property at the south end of the dead zone has been used as a landfill and dump for years. The remains of the school, destroyed by the 1999 tornado, is buried beneath it along with construction debris later dumped on top.
Funny any of the news reports did not mention that after the December flood of last year 18 dead ducks were recovered and none were sent in for testing. Why would dead ducks show up after flooding? I thought ducks could swim.
Maybe the birds died from the mold vapors that are in the air from the abandoned, flooded out houses. Just last week one of these houses was demolished disturbing the ground it was on.
The contractor who demolished this house was told by the city not to burn anything or he would be arrested. Beebe does not enforce any burning regulations because people burn in their yards all year long. When new houses are built in Beebe contractors burn their debris so why was this house any different?
Dead ducks, dead blackbirds what is going on in Beebe?
I'm from Beebe and when I went home for Christmas, my dad told me to drive through the area around 5pm, when these birds were flocking from every side of town to a small group of low trees just west of Winwood (the "dead zone"). It was pretty spooky. The sky was totally black, and Winwood and the Beebe School District located next to it, looked like every tree in the area was filled with black leaves. There had to be millions of them.
They'd group in those low trees over night, probably huddling close together to stay warm. Isn't it a totally legitimate possibility that millions of birds in a small vicinity would mean they were breathing in each other's nastiness into their lungs. Then when they tried to fly, they'd asphyxiate?
Seems like the most reasonable explanation to me, but I'm no scientist in a hazmat suit.
The first thought I had was of the possiblity of a very large U.F.O. off conventional & stealth radar and detection. A large enough craft utilising powerful magnetic energy, could hypothetically, generate a frequency high enough to startle the Starling into the air, just prior to heart siezure. Other than that; Starling previously overly stressed from the tornado force winds, giving them little or no sleep the night(s) before, took one last flight, being overly/pre-stressed; either dropped from fatigue and or heart siezure. Some reported still alive on the ground.
If there is a landfill there, another possibility comes to mind. Perhaps there was a buildup of gasses that suddenly vented into an area where the birds were, and it took a few minutes for them to die so they were able to start flying before they died. A dump burp, so to speak. Methane can do that, but I don't know if that would kill things.
That was part of my consideration -a gas leak from underground pipes or from natural pockets in the ground. A super clean dump project would have ruled that out, post incident. Birds are hyper-sensitive to chemical odors and would have detected minute traces if there had been a gas issue and purched elsewhere for the night. I commend you for bringing up the gas hypothesis.
Why were the birds roosting in Windwood as rohallma describes? The reason was they did not have another place to go. For years they have settled down at night just west of Windwood but most of the tress between Beebe and Ward were clear cut so there was no place left for them to spread out at night. I wouldn't be surprised to see the birdfall happening again this winter.
Birds are very tribal creatures. In the wild they are keeen survivors and can adapt to finding food nearly everywhere humans exist. In their large groups, they make up for whatever they lack in agreeiveness. They seem to live for food, reproduction, keeping a social order and play. When this many birds die, it can stress out their surviving clan. However, being highly adaptive creatures, there will simply be more space and less stress, over all. I know many people find starling to be a nuisance in there yard trees and will sometimes clang pots and pans to drive them away. I hope that this incidence shall shead light on not only their vulnerabilities, but also, their beauty as a species. Birds have comingled with humans for so long, they count on us for part of their food chain. When this number of Starling die; it may sometimes be an omen of things to come for humans. For this reason of coexistence; perhaps humans may have a greater respect for these and other birds!
Ball lightning could have killed the birds. Ball lightning has been a widely documented occurrence before major earthquakes and if I lived in Arkansas or anywhere within a thousand miles of a New Madrid epicenter, then I would at least make sure I had some water saved up and don't sleep where a heavy piece of furniture could hit you.
Just saying...
btw lol on the title
The national news is presenting this with a lot of scare you/end of the world-type tactics that they always seem to do. I came here to get the story from a source a little closer to home.
Sounds tragic, but there are some things that we do on New Years (fireworks, shooting GUNS!) that could cause the birds to act so erractically. If I were a bird on New Years, I'd listen to previous generations and stay low to the ground. It's gotta be a bit stressful (listen to me personify the birds) BUT even still, the birds showed signs of physical trauma so it had to have been weather or otherwise.
BTW, Blackbirds, according or orthinomancy (divination through birds) shows that this is an omen of good fortune.
The massive bird and fish die-off in Arkansas are directly related and this was caused by a small circumsference of electromagnetic disturbance that penetrated the earths atmosphere over Arkansas. Consequently, this had a deadly effect on small fragile wildlife, including birds and fish on certain frequencies. The increasing gravitational anomaly that is affecting our solar system as we get nearer the alignment with the galactic plane and center of the Milky Way is causing an electromagnetic turbulence that also caused the previous bee die off. There is nothing spiritual in this, but a routine astronomical event that has been predicted thousands of years ago and now supported by heliophysics and geologic evidence known by the scientific community. The massive die-off of smaller and more fragile species is the precursor of bigger solar storms and other space borne anomalies, which the human specie could survive by indulging in an effective disaster planning and management strategy. Further inquiries and responses on this topic will be entertained for a brief period of time at esdlopez@gmail.com
My first thought was that the blackbird incident----and the thousands of dead fish which turned up a day or two before in the Arkansas River-----might have been the result of very un-natural causes. Perhaps a lethal after-effect of the military's ultra-secretive H.A.A.R.P. weapon? Just 'google' 'H.A.A.R.P. and you'll see what I mean. It would also explain the bizarre weather which was coincidental with the blackbird deaths.
Another theory is something more 'natural' in explanation, but no less ominous-----the disorientation and stress that might have been caused by the known shifting of the earth's tectonic plates. This is the theory which is akin to Polar Shifting-----believed to be more than just a theory by some scientists. It is also, I must not fail to add, a portent of the Mayan prohecy of December 21, 2012.
You might also throw into the ring some letal after-effect of operation of the Large Hadron Collider, Cern 2, in Switzerland. But that's just another wacko theory, right?
Whatever the cause, of one thing I am almost certain: These birds did not fall from the sky 'naturally'. My sinking suspicion----and a depressing one at that----is that the unholy hand of man is behind this one.
It would not be the first time.
In another life, I would like to be an ornithologist like Messiaen. I'd like to know hundreds of bird calls by heart, as if it were my second language. More immediately however, I'd like to find out why all those red-winged blackbirds fell from the Arkansas sky by the thousands on New Year's Eve. The paranoid side of me wonders if it is a sign of the apocalypse (perhaps Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road' is still too fresh in my mind). It wonders if this mysterious bird killing force will be the bringer of dust for all of us. It is curious that Messiaen not only obsessed over birds, but also the apocalypse, his most famous piece being "Quartet for the End of Time". Did he have some prophetic wisdom? Oh Messiaen, if you were alive, would you be trembling at your piano bench with knowledge that those poor blackbirds' demise will soon be our own?
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