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 Web site.
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 (USGS) 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 Web site 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 Web site.
“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,” it said.
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 about 2 million dead fish in the Chesapeake Bay.
Officials were quick to assuage 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,” a statement by the Maryland Department of the Environment said.
“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.”
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un sent Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) greetings with what appeared to be restrained rhetoric that comes as Pyongyang moves closer to Russia and depends less on its long-time Asian ally. Kim wished “the Chinese people greater success in building a modern socialist country,” in a reply message to Xi for his congratulations on North Korea’s birthday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported yesterday. The 190-word dispatch had little of the florid language that had been a staple of their correspondence, which has declined significantly this year, an analysis by Seoul-based specialist service NK Pro showed. It said
On an island of windswept tundra in the Bering Sea, hundreds of miles from mainland Alaska, a resident sitting outside their home saw — well, did they see it? They were pretty sure they saw it — a rat. The purported sighting would not have gotten attention in many places around the world, but it caused a stir on Saint Paul Island, which is part of the Pribilof Islands, a birding haven sometimes called the “Galapagos of the north” for its diversity of life. That is because rats that stow away on vessels can quickly populate and overrun remote islands, devastating bird
‘CLOSER TO THE END’: The Ukrainian leader said in an interview that only from a ‘strong position’ can Ukraine push Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘to stop the war’ Decisive actions by the US now could hasten the end of the Russian war against Ukraine next year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday after telling ABC News that his nation was “closer to the end of the war.” “Now, at the end of the year, we have a real opportunity to strengthen cooperation between Ukraine and the United States,” Zelenskiy said in a post on Telegram after meeting with a bipartisan delegation from the US Congress. “Decisive action now could hasten the just end of Russian aggression against Ukraine next year,” he wrote. Zelenskiy is in the US for the UN
A 64-year-old US woman took her own life inside a controversial suicide capsule at a Swiss woodland retreat, with Swiss police on Tuesday saying several people had been arrested. The space-age looking Sarco capsule, which fills with nitrogen and causes death by hypoxia, was used on Monday outside a village near the German border. The portable human-sized pod, self-operated by a button inside, has raised a host of legal and ethical questions in Switzerland. Active euthanasia is banned in the country, but assisted dying has been legal for decades. On the same day it was used, Swiss Department of Home