Doomsayers frenzied by worldwide bird carnage
A series of mass bird and fish deaths around the world have led doomsday
zealots to warn that the world's end is nigh. Scientists, however, have another
explanation: fireworks and cold weather.
By News Wires (text)
AFP - 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, doomsayers 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, scientist at the US Geological
Survey's National Wildlife Center.
"There is nothing apocalyptic or anything that is necessarily out of the
ordinary for what we would see in any given week."
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
unusual 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."
------------------------------------
Post message: [email protected]
Subscribe : [email protected]
Unsubscribe : [email protected]
List owner : [email protected]
Homepage : http://proletar.8m.com/Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/proletar/
<*> Your email settings:
Individual Email | Traditional
<*> To change settings online go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/proletar/join
(Yahoo! ID required)
<*> To change settings via email:
[email protected]
[email protected]
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[email protected]
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
