While backtracking on old news we’d like to file in the ‘that’s odd’ or ‘wtf’ mental file cabinet we discovered there’s a lot of large groups of animals falling dead from the skies or ceasing to swim in the lakes/seas.

About 5,000 red-winged blackbirds fall from the sky in Arkansas
Around the beginning of 2011, this happened:

“It’s important to understand that a sick bird can’t fly. So whatever happened to these birds happened very quickly,” Rowe told CNN Radio on Sunday.

“Something must have caused these birds to flush out of the trees at night, where they’re normally just roosting and staying in the treetops … and then something got them out of the air and caused their death and then they fell to earth,” Rowe added.

Rowe confirmed her theory in the USA Today.

It was someone shooting off professional grade fireworks in a residential district, scaring the night-blind birds out of their roost into a 25-mph flight that ran them into houses, signs and even the ground, says Karen Rowe, Arkansas Game and Fish Commission ornithologist.

“They were bouncing off houses, basketball backboards, trucks,” she says.

[…]

In addition, neighbors were also setting off fireworks and bottle rockets, which further confused the birds who were now madly trying to get back to their safe perches, Rowe says.

“I talked to individuals who were outside when the birds started crashing into things,” she says.After the birds took flight they would have been completely disoriented and flying at a high rate of speed, “most likely about 25 mph, given my experience with their cousins, the tricolored blackbird,” Meese says.

They would have flown up into the air, then back down looking for a safe place to roost.

“This rapid descent of living birds crashing into these multiple obstacles then caused the loud noises reported by the residents of Beebe, especially those that flew into rooftops or walls of houses,” Meese says. “This also accounts for the blunt force trauma to the breasts.”

That’s it people. It was just a massive amount of birds disturbed from their sleep by drunk humans. Not aliens. Not black helicopters. No sonic booms.

Although we admit to wanting to believe @LeeCamp’s theory.

via yahoo news, cnn, usa today

Dozens of drunken birds fall dead from alcohol poisoning in Romania

They alerted authorities, fearing the birds had died from avian flu.

But local veterinary officials decided the starlings had died after eating grape ‘marc’ – the leftovers from the wine-making process.

Well that was simple.

via bbc

Huffington Post creates mega-post on dead birds and other animals
We’ll resist falling into rampant hyperbole like the HP. We’ll simply point to their link.

via huff post

Hundreds of birds found dead near I-65

The birds were found by motorists in the early morning hours about 4 miles south of Athens on the shoulder of I-65, near the Brown’s Ferry Road exit.

via waaytv

What can we learn from all this?
All of these mass wildlife deaths point to the simple fact that Arkansas Game and Fish Commission ornithologist Karen Rowe was correct in this assumption.

But it’s taught Rowe that she and other wildlife experts need to do a better job of educating the public about the fact that wild animals die all the time. A bird that manages to hatch and leave the nest still has only a 70% chance of making it to its first birthday, she points out.

“Birds don’t go to the bird hospital and get put on life support and die there. They just die. Mother Nature is not a nice lady,” she says.