BEEBE, Ark. – Wildlife officials are trying to determine what caused more than 1,000 blackbirds to die and fall from the sky over an Arkansas town.
The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission said Saturday that it began receiving reports about the dead birds about 11:30 p.m. the previous night. The birds fell over a 1-mile area of Beebe, and an aerial survey indicated that no other dead birds were found outside of that area.
Commission ornithologist Karen Rowe said the birds showed physical trauma, and she speculated that "the flock could have been hit by lightning or high-altitude hail."
The commission said that New Year's Eve revelers shooting off fireworks in the area could have startled the birds from their roost and caused them to die from stress.
Robby King, a wildlife officer for the agency, collected about 65 dead birds, which will be sent for testing to the state Livestock and Poultry Commission lab and the National Wildlife Health Center lab in Madison, Wis.
Rowe said that similar events have occurred elsewhere and that test results "usually were inconclusive."
The red-winged blackbirds fell on rooftops, pavements and fields. One struck a woman walking her dog, while another hit a police car.
Birds were "littering the streets, the gardens, the driveways, everywhere," said Robby King, a county wildlife officer in Beebe, a community of 5,000 people north-east of the state capital, Little Rock. "It was hard to drive down the street in some places without running over them."
More than 3,000 birds fell to the ground. Scientists said fireworks appeared to have frightened the birds to such a degree that they crashed into homes, cars and each other. Some may have flown straight into the ground.
"The blackbirds were flying at rooftop level instead of treetop level" to avoid explosions above, said Karen Rowe, an ornithologist with the Arkansas Game and Fish commission. "Blackbirds have poor eyesight, and they started colliding with things."
Rowe stopped short of declaring the mystery solved, however, saying that laboratories planned to test bird carcasses for toxins or disease.
Other theories were that violent thunderstorms might have disoriented the flock, or that one bird could have led them all into a fatal plunge to the ground.
A few stunned birds survived the fall, and stumbled around like drunken revellers, according to witnesses. There was little light at the time, except for the fireworks and some lightning on the horizon. In the tumult, many birds probably lost their bearings.
"I turn and look across my yard, and there's all these lumps," said resident Shane Roberts, adding that he thought hail was falling until he saw a dazed blackbird under his truck.
Its now at a point that the world has to take notice too many facts just to be a coincidence ,maybe its time to prepare for the worst scenario.
