Its started!!!!
Mass bird and fish deaths stoke
curiosity
Posted: 07 January 2011 0525 hrs
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A vet examines dead birds at a lab in Arkansas.
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WASHINGTON: Five thousand dead blackbirds rained
from the sky on the first day of the New Year in Arkansas. Then
more dead birds fell in other states. Then huge fish kills were
discovered in multiple US waterways.
And suddenly it became a worldwide phenomenon, with reports of mass
die-offs of birds and fish in Sweden, Britain, Japan, Thailand,
Brazil and beyond.
Doves, jellyfish, snapper, jackdaws... it seemed no species was
immune.
Conspiracy theorists, doomsdayers and religious extremists warned
that the end was nigh.
Could it be astronauts testing a potent sound beam to ward off
aliens? The US military experimenting with satellite-powered energy
weapons?
What about chemical sprays, meteor showers, or earthquakes
activating pollutants from the BP oil spill in the Gulf of
Mexico?
"Birds" surged to the most searched term on The New York Times
website.
Religious bloggers loaded their sites with Bible verse, Hosea
4:1-3: "The land dries up, and all who live in it waste away; the
beasts of the field, the birds in the sky and the fish in the sea
are swept away."
But as speculation roiled the blogosphere, wildlife experts rolled
their eyes.
"It is not that unusual," said Kristen Schuler, a scientist at the
US Geological Survey's National Wildlife Health Center.
"There is nothing apocalyptic or anything that is necessarily out
of the ordinary for what we would see in any given week."
Indeed, the USGS keeps a log on its website with reports of groups
of birds dying each week, averaging from dozens to thousands.
Regarding the bird deaths in Arkansas, where the local custom is to
set off fireworks to mark New Year's Eve, officials determined it
was likely that the noise set off a deadly bird panic.
"It appears unusually loud noises, reported shortly before the
birds began to fall, caused the birds to flush from a roost," the
USGS National Wildlife Health Center said in a statement posted on
the Arkansas Fish and Game Commission website.
"Additional fireworks in the area may have forced the birds to fly
at a lower altitude than normal and hit houses, vehicles, trees and
other objects. Blackbirds have poor night vision and typically do
not fly at night."
In Louisiana, Schuler said it looked like cold weather might have
killed off about 500 birds.
Meanwhile in Maryland, locals were spooked by reports of some two
million dead fish in the Chesapeake Bay.
But officials were quick to assuage those concerns, saying the
deaths were a result of an unusual cold snap, combined with an
overpopulation of a species known as spot fish.
"Natural causes appear to be the reason for the deaths of the
fish," said a statement by the Maryland Department of the
Environment.
"Spot may have difficulty surviving in colder temperatures, and the
species' susceptibility to winter kills is well-documented," it
said, noting that surface water temperatures last month were the
coldest in 25 years.
As for the bird and fish deaths elsewhere in the world, many were
still under investigation.
According to the National Wildlife Federation's Doug Inkley, the
most frequent cause of mass death in birds is disease, though
pollution and "just plain accidents" can also trigger large scale
die-offs. Often, people just are not aware of them.
"Most of the time these areas are not near human habitation such as
in forests or in the woods," he said on CNN.
But in today's Internet Age, when hardly anything remains secret,
word of mass bird deaths has spread with unparalleled speed.
"In 1960, if a bunch of birds started falling from the sky it may
have been noticed by some people. It may have gotten reported in
the local paper, but it may never have gotten any further than
that," said Robert Thompson, professor
of pop culture at Syracuse University.
"Now some of these kinds of stories, because they get out there on
the Internet, if they are compelling enough they can immediately
make this jump to national news," he said.
"Let's face it, big quantities of birds falling from the sky or
fish going belly up is a pretty compelling story."
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