Birds falling from the sky

[bbomber]

Have you heard about all the birds dying and falling to the ground? Big story last week. haven't heard anymore theory's about it. bb

[Chikz]

Yes. It's "old news" now.
Actually, sudden, massive die-offs are not uncommon. There was a drumfish die-off at around the same time as the redwing blackbirds falling from the sky, and in Sweden there were thousands of jackdaws that also suddenly died.

I used to work as a naturalist-educator, many moons ago, and even then we'd hear reports of a big die-off of fish, or birds, or whatever that wasn't attributable to agricultural pesticide or other chemical poisoning, etc.

Sometimes it happens because the population is at a critical mass where they simply don't have enough to eat, or in the case of fish, their wastes have reached toxic levels in the water where they live. Then there were freakish tornadoes in Arkansas, and that might also have caused a disruption in the birds' feeding, navigation and roosting. Some scientists hypothesize that sudden noises (such as New Year's fireworks) startled them into flight at night and they were disoriented or shocked and traumatized. Could be. Maybe something else.

But rest assured it's not an omen of apocolyptic events to come!

[Patrick]

I agree. Don't fall for the media's sensationalism. When was it that we were all supposed to die of "bird flu"? Thankfully those cows aren't too mad lately. It's a slow news period. Paris Hilton, Brittney Spears or OJ should act up again, to give them something to obsess about.

[Chikz]

I agree. Don't fall for the media's sensationalism. When was it that we were all supposed to die of "bird flu"? Thankfully those cows aren't too mad lately. It's a slow news period. Paris Hilton, Brittney Spears or OJ should act up again, to give them something to obsess about.

Speaking of OJ, a news item just came out that F. Lee Bailey claims OJ is innocent, according to some documents he is citing. Go get 'em, Mass Media!

[Evy]

They'll have to save it until the 24/7 coverage of the mess in Arizona cools off. They haven't mentioned a Red-wing or Starling since Sat.

[jungle]

I still have a real problem with the explanation of these "normal" deaths. First of all, I am not suggesting that there is some supernatural cause, nor am I preparing for the end of days. I am simply a critical thinker who appreciates logic and reason and I just cannot accept an explanation that these things "just happen". To me, that is no different that saying "she just got pregnant" without knowing how. There are basic physiological and biological processes that cannot be ignored. In the example of the Red Wing Blackbirds, approximately 3000 birds died and dropped from the sky in the same area. The scientist in me immediately starts thinking of possibilities in a search for a logical explanation. The cause would have to be something that would affect every individual at the same exact time. This is where I start running into problems. Individual animals simply are not carbon-copies of each other. They do not have the exact same tolerance to disease, hunger, cold stress, etc... and therefore do not react like the 'Borg' as a single organism. This is what drives evolution and prevents entire species from being wiped out by one thing. Keeping this in mind, it seems incredibly unlikely that 3000 individuals would succumb to disease, stress or hunger all at the same exact time. After all, how many people have lost their entire flock of fowl, hundreds of animals, or even 50, on the same day due to disease? And if you had, would you really just chalk it up to something that "just happens"? The majority of potential causes would leave some type of evidence that would be discovered upon necropsy. Even if 3000 birds just so happened to starve to death at the same time on the same day, the fact would be quite evident in post mortem exam. Toxicology screens would also show if the flock had fed on something poisonous as well. One thing I find particularly difficult to explain regards the fact that these are very mobile animals on the move. Huge flocks on migration are not kept in one spot for long. I could easily accept many deaths scattered along hundreds of miles as birds succumb to the incredible stresses of flying for thousands of miles. It is a different story when it happens in one spot. My biggest problem with this is that the statement was made that these things typically go unsolved as investigation and necropsy usually show no clear answers. From a biological standpoint I cannot accept this. I also find it difficult to believe that the scientific community just writes it off as something to just scratch one's head over but not take too seriously. There must be a biological explanation and it bothers me that the only individuals that really give these events much attention are those who are not expecting to live past Dec 21st, 2012.

[Chikz]

jungle,
When I was an ag-college undergrad at "State U," back in the '70s, I worked for a zoology prof. in his lab. He was an ornithologist, and his area of specialization was bird-flocking behaviors. One of his grad students was working on figuring out the speed of reaction of birds. These guys were among the first to start understanding why and how various bird species fly in flocks.

Anyway, one thing they found out was that small passerine birds such as weaver finches ("English sparrows") and starlings, have reaction times 5X faster than that of humans. This is part of why when you see a flock of starlings wheeling and banking in the sky, they all seem to move absolutely as one unit, and no birds crash into each other. That's how fine-tuned they are to "group dynamics" in flight. And, it doesn't take much to throw them off.

Such birds also have very sensitive neuro-systems in other ways, too. They are very susceptible to shock, and one can be induced to "drop dead" just by exposing it to a very loud noise. The thousands-strong flock of blackbirds (US) and jackdaws (Sweden), are thought to have been shocked and disoriented by fireworks shot off by various towns celebrating New Year's Eve. It's possible.

It's not likely to be disease -- what disease would suddenly wipe out several thousand birds simultaneously? Poison? It would show up in necropsy, and again it's not likely that so many birds would succumb together at the exact same time. It's not unheard of that large numbers of birds consume botulism-contaminated food, or fermented berries, etc., but I just have to wonder at the simultaneousness of their deaths.

I'm more inclined to think these simultaneous. deaths may be sound-induced, or shockwave (as in sonic boom) induced.

FWIW

[jungle]

http://www.aolnews.com/2011/01/21/us-agriculture-department-acknowledges-poisoning-birds-in-south/

Logical explanation.

[Altair]

^ A different area but a rational source, though I thought I remember reading poison was ruled out in the Arkansas case.

[jungle]

Perhaps it was, but like I said in my original post, I'm not proposing any particular cause, only refusing to accept that things like this "just happen" and we will likely never know why.

[Altair]

Perhaps it was, but like I said in my original post, I'm not proposing any particular cause, only refusing to accept that things like this "just happen" and we will likely never know why.

I agree there. Here's the link I watched the other day http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/41178569/ns/us_news-environment/41058087 And who knows what substance they use as poison, it may be a type that metabolizes quickly and doesn't leave many traces. I found it odd they mentioned it was okay if the birds were eaten by animals/house pets.

[Chikz]

I just don't buy the poison idea. Especially since in Sweden, several thousand jackdaws dropped dead simultaneously around the same time. In the middle of a Swedish winter. It's not likely that all birds would spontaneously drop dead from poison and fall from the sky together. That's just a little beyond "over the edge."

As I mentioned earlier, I've worked with songbirds and passerines, and they have extremely sensitive nervous systems. They function with reaction times 6X that of humans, and the flip side of that is that shock is easily induced in them by sound and sudden changes in their environment.

It's far more likely that a sudden noise or weather change caused the birds to panic en masse and die of shock and trauma and perhaps crashing into things in the dark of night.

[jungle]

I can certainly appreciate the impressive reaction times and heightened senses of Passerine species however I still do not believe that they are these exceptionally fragile little creatures that so easily perish if anything suddenly changes in their environment. Such organisms would simply not survive the gauntlet of evolution. If these species are so sensitive to unexpected stimuli then why do they not die of fright en masse every time they hear a clap of thunder or are pursued by predators. Every day in the life of an organism is a constant test, forcing them to push their tolerance to the limit, expecting the unexpected and having the ability to quickly react to circumstances in order to survive to the next day. If the species cannot handle sudden changes in weather or unexpected noise then I would not expect them to survive long. Nature is not a serene and quiet place with no challenges to overcome.

[Chikz]

Many species are "high strung" as a result of their neural wiring, which is what I was trying to say. Starlings, weaver finches (AKA "English sparrows"), etc. can be induced to pass out from shock with the right stimulus, such as loud noises.

I'm not kidding. I really did work in a lab where this research was being done in the '70s. A side effect of having a heightened "flight reflex" reaction time, is the heightened susceptibility to shock and neural trauma. That is far more probable cause than anything else that has been suggested by the media, et al., so far.

[Patrick]

I'd like to know when this research transitions from the lab into actual use. I've got a lot of sparrows and starlings in my barn that so far have not been affected at all by any stimuli I've thrown at them, no matter how loud I yell.

[Evy]

I'd like to know when this research transitions from the lab into actual use. I've got a lot of sparrows and starlings in my barn that so far have not been affected at all by any stimuli I've thrown at them, no matter how loud I yell.

If that doesn't do it, nothing will, Patrick! ;-)

Every Memorial Day weekend I endure 2 nights of a 10 minute fireworks display about 1500' from my house. It literally rattles my windows. As with a T-storm, none of my WF abandon their nests, my lawn isn't littered with dead sparrows or starlings (I wish), but my neighbor spends the time trying to sooth her horses who go crazy.
I've read of villages shooting off loud ''cannons'' to drive huge flocks of roosting crows or starlings away. I haven't seen any reports of them falling to the ground, but instead circling & re-roosting.
I suppose a heavy concussion directly into a flock could bring them down but fireworks are designed to explode at a much higher altitude then birds roost. Maybe a misfire in those cases ? Hard to believe even that could happen twice.
As for fish kills...they happen everywhere .

[Patrick]

Are you saying that I yell a lot? Only online!

I deal with a lot of pet owners who create or at least worsen their animal's problems during thunder storms and fireworks. Some animals really do have some amount of anxiety, but it's usually no where near as bad as it gets turned into. People ask me for a "trick", a training secret, or more likely, which drugs they can use to help the animal through it. They often don't like my answer, that they should ignore the problem when it happens, and then try to desensitize them afterward. There are some great CDs available to use for that. But, no, many people don't like that advice. It's not caring, happy or kind, in their minds, and doesn't make them feel all warm and fuzzy, and it doesn't give immediate results. Funny, I got a new dog some years back that crouched under the table and shivered during a storm. The others I think looked at her like she was nuts, esp if she thought she was going to get any sympathy from me. By the third storm I think, she was fine.

Back to the subject, I too would like to know the cause of these bird deaths, and don't accept that it's unexplainable. I have heard that some birds do get killed by the air turbulence or some such thing, of windmills, not just the blades themselves.

[Chikz]

Being realistic, it isn't just the loud noise or a sudden atmospheric change -- it would have to be a combination of factors, of which that is just one of several. My hypothesis here is that there were other factors, such as the fact that these birds were in their winter-migratory flocks of thousands -- much more than the smaller flocks hanging around Evy's barnyard. The dynamics of thousands of birds startled into flight, in the dark, disoriented and perhaps surrounded by obstacles or barriers (hillsides, forests, etc.) can all contribute.

Have you ever watched a flock of starlings in flight -- hundreds of them -- wheeling and pitching in unison, as though they were all programmed with the same GPS coordinates? Never bumping into each other? That is due to their hyper-wired nervous systems coupled with sensory sensitivity to atmospheric/air currents (they can feel the air vortices stirred up by their flockmates in flight). This combination allows them to maintain just the right distance from each other to avoid collision or down-shear, and to react seemingly instantaneously to any change in flight direction, however slight. So, they all wheel and bank in unison.

It doesn't take much to throw off that dynamic.

Anyway, I find it so much more plausible than poisoning "conspiracy theories." ;)

Patrick -- the above info was just a byproduct of research that was done on flock-flying dynamics at the University of RI (where I was working as a lab assistant and student biolab coordinator). I doubt it ever went into practice, though the data from the flock-flying did get absorbed into today's "common knowledge" about how and why birds such as Canada geese fly in "V" formations. One of the grad students in the lab was doing reaction-time research on starlings at that time, and I was privy to his research and findings. Fascinating stuff.

[Patrick]

Patrick -- the above info was just a byproduct of research that was done on flock-flying dynamics at the University of RI (where I was working as a lab assistant and student biolab coordinator). I doubt it ever went into practice, though the data from the flock-flying did get absorbed into today's "common knowledge" about how and why birds such as Canada geese fly in "V" formations. One of the grad students in the lab was doing reaction-time research on starlings at that time, and I was privy to his research and findings. Fascinating stuff.

Good to know. I was hoping that your experience wasn't in Marc Hauser's lab at Harvard.

[Chikz]

No, it was Frank Heppner's lab at URI. Google "Frank Heppner" and "V formation" and you'll see links to articles and whatnot. He was working mainly with large species -- geese, ducks, V-formation flyers. But his lab was a hotbed of activity for grad student research, and that's where the passerine/songbird reaction-time research was being done. They all kind of tied in with each other when it came to understanding flock dyanamics, and helped distinguish between the tight-cluster "amoeba" flocks of small birds such as blackbirds and starlings, and large birds like geese, gulls, etc. that end up in more of a line or "V" instead of amorphous clusters.

[jungle]

Have you ever watched a flock of starlings in flight -- hundreds of them -- wheeling and pitching in unison, as though they were all programmed with the same GPS coordinates? Never bumping into each other? That is due to their hyper-wired nervous systems coupled with sensory sensitivity to atmospheric/air currents (they can feel the air vortices stirred up by their flockmates in flight). This combination allows them to maintain just the right distance from each other to avoid collision or down-shear, and to react seemingly instantaneously to any change in flight direction, however slight. So, they all wheel and bank in unison.

It doesn't take much to throw off that dynamic.

This is just one concept that I have a problem with. The first paragraph goes into great detail explaining how incredible the sensory systems of these birds are, how they can feel atmospheric air currents created by flockmates and can instantanously change flight direction to avoid collision, no matter how closely they fly. It is then followed by a statement claiming it is now a system that is easily corrupted and it is no longer such a miraculous ability. If it is that easy to throw off then why are they not crashing into each other? It's either an exceptional ability or it is not. I can easily believe the first part but have difficulty with the latter. Perhaps researchers were able to disrupt the birds and startle them to death under captive conditions but I want to see this theory be replicated in the field where thousands of birds are literally scared to death at the same instant. In vitro and in situ conditons, and the organism's reactions in each, are very different things.

Along the same thought that Evy mentioned, if fireworks were such a hazard then surely we would see more mass deaths at all the Disney parks and a full-on blood bath on July 4th. Many of the suggested explanantions happen all the time and are not associated with mass die-offs as one would expect if they were, in fact, a real possible cause.

[Chikz]

I don't see a discrepency, jungle. The shock waves of a sonic boom, or a sudden powerful wind, disrupts the atmosphere in ways even we can perceive. To a flock of birds, the effect can be devastating. They can have a fine-tuned system, but even so, an extreme situation that is "not much" to us, can bollux their precision.

The neuro "wiring" that makes them so precise, also makes them hypersensitive to -extreme- disruptions, not the daily "mundane" stuff like a hawk attack.

[jungle]

The discrepancy is that these stimuli- a sudden powerful wind, happen all the time. We are not finding mass deaths all the time. I cannot see how an animal can evolve in an environment, and be so successful that they can number in the billions, yet be so succeptible to that environment that something as mundane as a gust of wind will kill thousands of them instantaneously and drop them on a dime. It does not make biological sense.

In order for this to be a valid explanation, one would be forced to accept both of the following: 1) Thousands of these birds could experience instant death from a shock of loud noise or gust of wind while thousands are unaffected. 2) These same loud noises and gusts of wind that happen quite frequently normally do not have this effect otherwise we would be seeing this type of thing all the time.

In order to explain the phenomina's presence you must also explain it's absence.

I am also curious to know what the methodology was that generated the data that shows these birds to be so fragile and vulnerable to their environment. Was this actually demonstrated in the field (and how) or was it extrapolated from behaviors witnessed in the lab in flights or wind tunnels?

[goosedragon]

I'd like to know when this research transitions from the lab into actual use. I've got a lot of sparrows and starlings in my barn that so far have not been affected at all by any stimuli I've thrown at them, no matter how loud I yell.I have to agree Patrick I grew up on a large fruit farm and we used explosive noise makers trying to keep the birds from the soft fruits when they were near ripe. After the first week the only thing they scared off were the humans that were helping themselves to our fruit. We had one that went to law enforcement claiming we were using shotguns as a scare device.

[Chikz]

Hi jungle,
It's not my hypothesis that the birds in the mass die-offs were so fragile and vulnerable that they "fainted dead away," but that the phenomenon that served as the catalyst was extreme enough to create sufficient shockwaves to disrupt the birds' flight, cause mass panic and disorientation, and cause them to collide with one another and with any other obstacles in their flight path. The birds' "high-strung" and refined nervous systems, which serve a vital function in flight dynamics as well as predator evasion, in this case may have given them a level of vulnerability that contributed to the event, however.

As for the research I mentioned, I can only report what I observed myself back in the '70s, and it was just one small piece of research, the data for which was added to a larger collective later. What I observed was only for reaction times in perching birds such as starlings and weaver finches ("English sparrows"). A sensor-rigged perch and low levels of electric shock were used as the stimulus to measure the reaction speeds.

The V-formation reasearch, however, was done in the field, using a model rocket launcher (anyone remember Estes?) and a video camera mounted on the rocket. The ornithologist and his assistant sought out areas where flocks of Canada geese were hanging out, waited until one of the flocks took off, and launched the rocket-camera into the flock mid-air.

The first round of cameras-in-the air were not successful, but eventually they started getting some useful footage, if I recall correctly. But of the early attempts, my favorite film is one where you see a cloud of smoke, then just air, then a goose's face as the cam-rock whizzes by it, then suddenly a 180-degree loop, then a spiralling, seasickness-inducing view of the ground that gets closer and closer and...SPLAT! Then you see a bug's eye view of a jungle of grass looming all around, then the feet of the assistant and a hand reaching down... lol! We used to show that at the Friday afternoon lab-assistant/grad student beer swillings. :D

[Patrick]

It is AOL, so take it with a grain of salt, but I just found this:

http://www.aolnews.com/2011/01/27/scientists-say-blunt-force-trauma-killed-arksanas-blackbirds/

[Mary]

Well, all interesting theories. I will share mine. What if the cause was not tested for or there is no test that would confirm the cause? Or maybe a bacteria,virus or parasite, when ingested could cause the same reaction at approximately the same time, given several minutes time span? After all, the metabolism of the small birds is very rapid. Or maybe a food poisoning not yet identified, or poison that escaped testing for or was never suspected, so no test was done to identify it. Human knowledge is limited and humans make mistakes. And who saw the birds? Is there anyone to collaborate the story other than the news media? Their stories often times remind me of the theatrics of the movies and TV shows. How much is real? How much is to sell advertising for TV, radio, newspapers and magazines? Looks like there may be more questions than answers.

[George]

I heard about this news that birds are falling but could not read the whole story.
Now with the help of the thread I get the whole story and the reasons of falling.

Baltimore personal trainer (http://www.neverstopfitness.com/the-truth-about-boot-camps-part-1-baltimore-personal-trainer/)

[FernFloyd]

:O
from the sky??
first time i hear about that
here where i live nothing like that happened, my 8 pigeons are fine
like all the other birds and cattle

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