Consider this: According to the U. Fish and Wildlife Service , anywhere from million to one billion birds die each year from collisions with windows alone communications towers and power lines claim countless more. Cars kill tens of millions of birds. Cats — both feral and domestic — probably do in hundreds of millions more. In other words, birds die all the time. But in such huge numbers, in such a short span of time, while on the wing?
Douglas Stotz, a conservations ornithologist at the Field Museum in Chicago. In , hundreds of birds rained down rained down on Perth, Australia, just a year after gulls dropped dead from the skies over nearby Esperance; the cause, in both cases, toxins Three weeks after the Esperance event a few dozen assorted birds died in Austin, Tex.
Unsurprisingly, no link was established. In March of last year, 75 starlings turned up dead — bashed to death, it seemed — in a tight cluster on a driveway in Coxley, England. Cause of death: miscalculation. After investigating, experts concluded the birds either took an evasive maneuver to avoid a predator and crashed into the driveway or mistook the patina of the concrete for a bed of reeds and came in too fast the black box was never recovered. But the Arkansas event as well as the one in Louisiana, though less is known about it at this point is still peculiar in several aspects.
The birds all seemed to die rather quickly within the span of roughly an hour according to reports and in a relatively small area.
Weather, a usual culprit in these kinds of events, seemed unlikely, as storms in the area had moved out hours earlier. So what realistically killed the birds over Beebe and Louisiana, and Kentucky, and Sweden?
Try National Geographic's online bird identifier. Birds often hit objects in flight, especially "tall buildings in cities, or cell phone towers, or wind turbines, or power lines," Butcher said. Collisions with power lines seem to have killed roughly blackbirds and starlings in Louisiana on Tuesday. The 50 to jackdaws found on a street in Sweden that same day showed no signs of disease and also apparently died from blunt-force trauma, according to the Swedish National Veterinary Institute.
Wind, snow, hail, lightning , and other challenges posed by weather can easily kill flying birds too. For example, "last year a couple of hundred pelicans washed up by the Oregon-Washington border," Butcher said.
Also see "Bird Color Mysteries Explained. Of course, death doesn't just stalk birds from above. For instance, "waterfowl get botulism—and salmonella and avian pox can spread at bird feeders," Butcher said. No matter how it arrives, death appears to be very much a fact of life for birds.
How many migratory warblers do you want to kill just to get better cell phone reception? All rights reserved. A Towering Problem for Birds Birds often hit objects in flight, especially "tall buildings in cities, or cell phone towers, or wind turbines, or power lines," Butcher said. She does, though, see a silver lining in the sky-is-falling coverage this week.
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According to Graves, we may never know what spooked them, conclusively. The proximate cause was death by blunt force trauma, but what spooked the birds, that hasn't been absolutely determined," Graves said. You can't go back in time and recreate the event and no one was there recording the event as it happened. The Arkansas Game and Fish statement reports that radar images determined that the first group of approximately 6, to 7, birds began their exodus at PM. There was another exodus, slightly smaller in number, at PM.
Gary Graves knows Sidney Gauthreaux, the expert who studied the images, and trusts his findings.
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