1,000 Birds Fall from Arkansas Sky in Hitchcockian Scene

Robert Roy Britt

LiveScience.com robert Roy Britt

livescience.com – Sun Jan 2, 1:41 pm ET

It has residents creeped out.

"Something out of a movie and Hazmat people are walking around not telling us anything," said one.

"I'd like to know. Kind of spooky, you never know what's going to happen," said another.

Scientists are puzzled, but they don't suspect any Hitchcockian paranormal activity.

As many as 2,000 blackbirds fell from the sky just before New Year's, according to a local news report. A scientist said the birds might have been stuck by lightning or hit with a hailstorm, or maybe they're the victims of overzealous New Year's even revelers.

It all started around 11:30 pm local time, just a half hour before the new year, according to the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission.

"Beginning at around 11:30 p.m., enforcement officers with Arkansas Game and Fish Commission (AGFC) began getting reports of dead black birds falling from the sky in the city limits of Beebe," the agency said in a statement.

Officials estimate more than 1,000 blackbirds fell out of the sky over a 1-mile area in city before Dick Clark finished his countdown. Most were dead, but some were still alive when officers arrived, according to the statement.

"Shortly after I arrived there were still birds falling from the sky," said AGFC wildlife officer Robby King, who 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.

Agency officials later flew over the area and found no dead birds 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. And in general, birds are often at the whim of weather. Birds are sometimes swept hundreds of miles from their normal range when caught up in hurricanes. In the Arctic, birds are known to die crashing into each other in heavy fog, while others perish when heavy winds slam them into cliffs.

Even fish can succumb to weird weather: Several instances of raining fish have been reported over the years, as one example, and scientists say tornado-like waterspouts could be to blame for those events.

A host of possibilities have been raised in the Arkansas bird mystery.

"The birds showed physical trauma and that the flock could have been hit by lightning or high-altitude hail," Rowe said. It's also possible New Year's Eve celebrators, shooting off fireworks, might have startled the birds from their roost and caused them to die from stress, Rowe speculated.

"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," Rowe said.

The necropsies - animal autopsies - will begin on Monday in an effort to determine the cause.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/...BiaXJkc2ZhbA--

Labs seek clues after 3,000 birds die in Arkansas
By JEANNIE NUSS, Associated Press Jeannie Nuss, Associated Press – 22 mins ago

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – Wildlife experts are trying to solve a mystery that evoked images of the apocalypse: Why did more than 3,000 red-winged blackbirds tumble from the Arkansas sky shortly before midnight on New Year's Eve?

Scientists are investigating whether bad weather, fireworks or poison might have forced the birds out of the sky, or if a disoriented bird simply led the flock into the ground.

"We have a lot more questions," said Karen Rowe, an ornithologist with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. She said there are documented cases of birds becoming confused and plunging to earth.

Residents of the small town of Beebe, northeast of Little Rock, awoke Saturday to find thousands of dead blackbirds littering a 1.5-square-mile area. The birds inexplicably dropped dead, landing on homes, cars and lawns. Cleanup crews wore protective suits, gas masks and rubber gloves as they spent the holiday weekend gathering the carcasses.

The director of Cornell University's ornithology lab in Ithaca, N.Y., said the most likely suspect is violent weather. It's probable that thousands of birds were asleep, roosting in a single tree, when a "washing machine-type thunderstorm" sucked them up into the air, disoriented them, and even fatally soaked and chilled them.

"Bad weather can occasionally catch flocks off guard, blow them off a roost, and they get hurled up suddenly into this thundercloud," lab director John Fitzpatrick said.

Rough weather had hit the state earlier Friday, but the worst of it was already well east of Beebe by the time the birds started falling, said Chris Buonanno, a forecaster with the National Weather Service in North Little Rock.

If weather was the cause, the birds could have died in several ways, Fitzpatrick said. They could easily become disoriented — with no lights to tell them up and down — and smack into the ground. Or they could have died from exposure.

The birds' feathers keep them at a toasty 103 degrees, but "once that coat gets unnaturally wet, it's only a matter of minutes before they're done for," Fitzpatrick said.

Regardless of how they died, the birds will not be missed. Large blackbird roosts like one at Beebe can have thousands of birds that leave ankle- to knee-deep piles of droppings in places.

Nearly a decade ago, state wildlife officials fired blanks from shotguns and cannons to move a roost of thousands of blackbirds from Beebe. In recent years, many of the migratory birds returned.

Red-winged blackbirds are the among North America's most abundant birds, with somewhere between 100 million and 200 million nationwide, Fitzpatrick said. Rowe put the number of dead in Beebe at "easily 3,000."

Bird carcasses were shipped to the Arkansas Livestock and Poultry Commission and the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis. Researchers in Georgia also asked for a set of the dead birds. Test results could be back in a week.

Rowe said many of the birds suffered injuries from striking the ground, but it was not clear whether they were alive when they hit. A few grackles and a couple of starlings were also among the dead. Those species roost with blackbirds, particularly in winter.

Tens of thousands of blackbirds can roost in a single tree. And they do not see well at night, when they usually sleep, Fitzpatrick said.

Earlier Friday, a tornado killed three people in Cincinnati, Ark., about 150 miles away. Then a couple hours before the birds died, thunderstorms also passed through parts of central Arkansas. Lightning could have killed the birds directly or startled them to the point that they became confused. Hail also has been known to knock birds from the sky.

In 2001, lightning killed about 20 mallards at Hot Springs, and a flock of dead pelicans was found in the woods about 10 years ago, Rowe said. Lab tests showed that they, too, had been hit by lighting.

Back in 1973, hail knocked birds from the sky at Stuttgart, Ark., on the day before hunting season. Some of the birds were caught in a violent storm's updrafts and became encased in ice before falling from the sky.

Rowe and Fitzpatrick said poisoning was possible but unlikely. Rowe said birds of prey and other animals, including dogs and cats, ate several of the dead birds and suffered no ill effects.

"Every dog and cat in the neighborhood that night was able to get a fresh snack that night," Rowe said.

___

AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein contributed to this report from Washington.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110103/...NzZWVrY2x1ZQ--

Arkansas bird deaths may be from fireworks stress

LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas (Reuters) – Stress from New Year's Eve fireworks may have caused the deaths of up to 5,000 birds in Beebe, Ark., which mysteriously began falling from the sky late Friday night, state officials said on Monday.

Officials believe that stress may be a more likely cause than severe weather such as hail or a lightning strike because the severe weather had already left the area.

"We're leaning more toward a stress event," said Arkansas Game and Fish Commission spokesman Keith Stephens. He said fireworks could have caused the mostly blackbirds to fly into houses or have heart attacks. Test results are expected on Monday or later this week.

The commission also is trying to determine what caused the deaths of up to 100,000 fish over a 20-mile stretch of the Arkansas River near a dam in Ozark, 125 miles west of Beebe. The fish were discovered December 30.

Stephens said the commission expects results on the fish tests in probably a month. Disease may be the culprit, since all the fish were one species -- bottom-feeding drum, Stephens said.

Stephens said the events do not appear related. Both that section of the river and the air at the site of the bird deaths were tested for toxins, Stephens said. Beebe is a town of about 4,500 people located 30 miles northeast of the state capital.

(Writing by Mary Wisniewski, Editing by Greg McCune)


http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/us_arkans...Fuc2FzYmlyZA--

First Birds Fall, Now 100,000 Fish Dead in Arkansas

Thousands of dead fish have turned up in an Arkansas river just days after 3,000 birds mysteriously dropped dead from the sky, but authorities say the deaths are not related.

An estimated 100,000 dead drum fish are floating along a 20-mile stretch of the Arkansas River and washing up on the river's banks near the town of Ozark in the northwestern part of the state.

The dead fish were discovered just after 3,000 red-wing blackbirds fell from the sky in the town of Beebe, more than 100 miles from the site of the dead fish. Officials, who tripled the early estimates of the number of dead birds, said the bird deaths may have been caused by lightning or by stress from fireworks and said they were unrelated to the fish kill.

Fish kills happen every year, but kills of this size are relatively rare. Hundreds more drum fish are sick and have been sent to the University of Arkansas for testing.

Andrew Goodwin, the associate director of the University of Arkansas' Aquaculture and Fisheries Center, said he didn't believe the deaths were caused by pollutants. "It's unlikely to be a toxin," Goodwin told AOL News by phone today.

Instead, Goodwin said he suspected that the drum fish may have experienced a population boom this summer that created more competition for food and sapped the weaker ones of their ability to fight off disease.

"It's your classic boom and bust," he said. "A group of fish will go into a population boom, and then they're competing for food, so they may not be in really good condition. Then during a cold snap the environment changes with the temperature, and their immune systems are compromised and can't always fight infection."

Goodwin said the area of the Arkansas River where the dead fish were found is not known to be particularly contaminated. He said it would take a few weeks for researchers to determine exactly what killed the fish.

Authorities said only drum fish seem to have been affected, making it even more unlikely that a pollutant is to blame.

"The fish kill only affected one species of fish," Keith Stephens of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission told CNN. "If it was from a pollutant, it would have affected all of the fish, not just drum fish."

The commission did not immediately respond to a request for comment this morning. Authorities are warning residents near the river to not eat the dead fish.


http://www.aolnews.com/2011/01/03/fi..._lnk1%7C193294

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_theloo...e-in-louisiana



After reports of thousands of dead red-winged blackbirds falling from the sky in Beebe, Arkansas -- along with reports of a massive fish kill in the same area -- raised concerned eyebrows across the land, another bird kill is being reported in a small town near Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Reports the Baton Rouge Advocate:


State biologists are trying to determine what led to the deaths of the estimated 500 red-winged blackbirds and starlings on La. 1 just down the road from Pointe Coupee Central High School.


The discovery of the dead birds — some of which were lying face down, clumped in groups, while others were face up with their wings outstretched and rigid legs pointing upward — comes just three days after more than 3,000 blackbirds rained down from the sky in Beebe, Ark. ... In Louisiana, biologists with the state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries spent part of the day Monday scooping up some of the birds in Pointe Coupee Parish to be sent for testing at labs in Georgia and Wisconsin.

Officials in Arkansas say that the thousands of dead birds and fish discovered there over the weekend died of natural causes. As you might expect, others are insinuating that something more sinister is going on.

(Photo: AP via The Daily Citizen/Warren Watkins)

****
natural causes? what natural cause kills birds in flight by the thousands all at the exact same time? And now in more than one place

something sinister indeed

Hmm, maybe the world WILL end in December of 2012 and we are seeing SIGNS right now....

I guess Connie and I need to accelerate our plans concerning what we want to do during our retirement.

Until the necropsy comes back, there's no way of telling what killed these birds. Think about their biology... the red-winged blackbird is a flocking species that often roosts communally with thousands of birds in a single group. Disease can spread rapidly when we're talking about overwintering birds that occur together in high densities.

For example, last year a naturally occurring disease known as salmonellosis (caused by one of over 2500 species of bacteria in the Salmonella genus) caused a natural fallout of thousands of Pine Siskins in the southeastern United States. I'm on the Important Bird Areas Committee for the state of Georgia and president of a local Audubon chapter, you can believe it when I say there was a lot of worry that this was a potential poisoning considering the Salmonella scare in peanut butter that happened at the same time (peanut butter is a primary ingredient in some suet recipes). The Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study (SCWDS) at the University of Georgia performed necropsies on dozens of siskins that were found dead across the state and determined the cause of death.

Red-winged blackbirds are known by bird banders to be notoriously delicate to disturbance. I work very closely with a master bander (and the Georgia IBA coordinator) on a research project at a local state park. Occasionally we do get a large flock of blackbirds flying into our mist nets, which is a harmless way to capture birds. However, we really double-time it to get blackbirds out of the net because they are quite literally "faint-hearted", and they can die from stress in the few minutes it takes us to extract them. I know many people think the fireworks story is a bit far-fetched, but after working with this species personally, I can believe it.

Seeing that a bunch of fish died off and the Red Winged Black Bird prefer the wetlands tells me something is in the water since no other birds have been affected.


Blackbirds fall from sky, fish die off: What's a conspiracy theorist to think?
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society...orist-to-think

I read an article last night on Yahoo. They determined that the birds were killed due to blunt force trauma. They were speculating maybe high altitude hail killed them. Here recently we have been getting alot of rain. I guess its conceiveable (sp?) that it could have started off as hail and melted into rain before it hit the ground.

They also said the birds were dead before they hit the ground.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_theloo...ratching-heads

maybe the military was testing some new sonic force weaponry or electromagnetic weapon..

that was the first thought that crossed my mind but I do tend to have thoughts that wander.