Why Are Birds Falling From the Sky?

But the in-air bird deaths aren’t due to some apocalyptic plague or insidious experiment—they happen all the time, scientists say. The recent buzz, it seems, was mainly hatched by media hype.

At any given time there are “at least ten billion birds in North America … and there could be as much as 20 billion—and almost half die each year due to natural causes,” said ornithologist Greg Butcher, director of bird conservation for the National Audubon Society in Washington, D.C.

National Geographic Daily News

4 thoughts on “Why Are Birds Falling From the Sky?”

  1. So, it is just a statistical anomaly that a whole flock of birds rolled snake eyes 43 times in a row? Isn’t it more plausible to expect that the 50% avian mortality rate would be spread a bit more randomly across both population and time? Let’s extend the argument. All humans die, therefore there would be nothing unusual about everyone in Cincinatti keeling over at once, given that spread statistically over the earth’s population, that number of deaths is normal. So long Queen City! C’mon, a thousand birds dropping dead out of the sky is weird shit.

    1. The article linked to in my post continues:

      “They collided with cars, trees, buildings, and other stationary objects,” said ornithologist Karen Rowe of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission.

      “Right before they began to fall, it appears that really loud booms from professional-grade fireworks—10 to 12 of them, a few seconds apart—were reported in the general vicinity of a roost of the birds, flushing them out,” Rowe said.

      “There were other, legal fireworks set off at the same time that might have then forced the birds to fly lower than they normally do, below treetop level, and [these] birds have very poor night vision and do not typically fly at night.”

      The dead birds found in Arkansas are of species that normally congregate in large groups in fall or winter. “The record I’ve heard is 23 million birds in one roost,” Audubon’s Butcher said.

      “In that context, 5,000 birds dying is a fairly small amount.”

      So maybe not so implausible.

  2. Good forensic work. But.Still.Weird. 5000 dead birds that weren’t there 5 minutes ago? The fact that we know what caused it to happen doesn’t make it any less weird to me.

    1. The reality, say biologists, is that these mass die-offs happen all the time and usually are unrelated.

      Federal records show they happen on average every other day somewhere in North America. Usually, we don’t notice them and don’t try to link them to each other.

      Mass Bird, Fish Deaths Occur Regularly

      Most of what passes for news is media hype.

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