(Related: "Migrating Birds Reset 'Compasses' at Sunset, Study Says.")Ĭollisions with power lines seem to have killed roughly 500 blackbirds and starlings in Louisiana on Tuesday. "On foggy nights, birds that should probably normally be paying attention to the stars get disoriented, and circle around the structures until they collapse" and fall. "The structures that seem to cause the most deaths are very tall and constantly lit," he said. (Try National Geographic's online bird identifier.)īirds often hit objects in flight, especially "tall buildings in cities, or cell phone towers, or wind turbines, or power lines," Butcher said. "In that context, 5,000 birds dying is a fairly small amount." "The record I've heard is 23 million birds in one roost," Audubon's Butcher said. The dead birds found in Arkansas are of species that normally congregate in large groups in fall or winter. "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 birds have very poor night vision and do not typically fly at night." "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. "They collided with cars, trees, buildings, and other stationary objects," said ornithologist Karen Rowe of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. Results from preliminary testing released Wednesday by the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin, show the birds died from blunt-force trauma, supporting preliminary findings released by the Arkansas Livestock and Poultry Commission on Monday. Officials estimate that up to 5,000 red-winged blackbirds, European starlings, common grackles, and brown-headed cowbirds fell before midnight. on New Year's Eve Arkansas wildlife officers started hearing reports of birds falling from the sky in a square-mile area of the city of Beebe. 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.īut what causes dead birds to fall from the sky en masse? The Arkansas case points to two common culprits: loud noises and crashes.īeginning at roughly 11:30 p.m. The recent buzz, it seems, was mainly hatched by media hype.Īt any given time there are "at least ten billion birds in North America. (See pictures of the Arkansas bird die-off.)īut the in-air bird deaths aren't due to some apocalyptic plague or insidious experiment-they happen all the time, scientists say. A mysterious rain of thousands of dead birds darkened New Year's Eve in Arkansas, and this week similar reports streamed in from Louisiana, Sweden, and elsewhere.
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