Alfred Hitchock, the famous director and producer released a movie years ago called The Birds. In that movie birds go crazy and attack humans. It just may be the opposite is coming true today. It seems that birds are dying all over the world and sometimes they just fall out of the sky. I am not talking about an occasional bird dying, I am talking about whole flocks of birds that just fall to the ground dead. This has to be one of the strangest events that most of us have ever seen or heard of. There are stories of this happening everywhere. There is nothing country specific or even state specific. What is causing this? No one is quite sure. Could it be a sign of dire things to come? Again we don't know. Miners of old used to put a canary in a mine because it would die first if poison gas got in, giving them a chance to get out. This raises the question, is this just the beginning, will humans start to fall, or have they already, but we just haven't noticed the trend yet?

Bird
Photo Source: National Park Service

December 22, 2007 was a very bad day for birds on Staten Island, one of the boroughs of New York City. The people of Bay Terrace were horrified when over 50 birds fell out of the sky dead or dying at their feet. Actually they were lucky that none of them landed on their heads. People in the area ran for shelter as birds smashed against the sidewalks and into structures. Health officials were at a loss to determine why the birds died. Anyone that knows about Staten Island, usually knows that it is the home of one of the largest garbage dumps in the country, if not in the world. This dump sometimes smells so bad that people driving through the borough are assaulted with vile smells from it. Could this have had any bearing on the bird deaths? To make the case even more strange, it was only one breed of bird that died. They were Purple Martins. Why would just one breed of bird be effected by something that was strong enough to kill them and yet it didn't seem to effect any other birds? This was very strange, very strange indeed. The birds that didn't die immediately. lay on the ground for a few minutes before expiring. They were flapping around and foaming at the mouth, sort of like a rabid dog. So what, if anything can we tell about why these birds died? Well we know that they were all the same species, so most scientists and medical people believe that it must have been from something they ate, that the other species didn't care for. One resident stated that there were rumors about everything, including the compost pile, and ammonia and that they must have ate something.

Now lets go to the other side of the world, how about Australia. A town in Australia named Esperance had been experiencing bird deaths at an alarming rate. In the last three weeks birds have been falling out of the sky either dead or dying, quite similar to what has happened in Staten Island, New York. It is estimated that 60 birds died in that period of time, but thousands of birds have died overall. How many birds have died? So many that there are now places where there are no birds at all. One resident alone picked up a few dead birds in front of her house, but then found about 30 more on her property. The residents were getting even more distressed when they noticed that birds were on the ground convulsing and flapping around before they died. Some of the birds were sent for examination, but there stomachs were empty, thus there was no evidence of what they had eaten because they must have thrown it up. So why types of birds are dying in Australia? Yellow-throated miners, new horned honeyeaters and wattle birds, which are nectar eaters, but seagulls were also being affected and they are carnivores, which sort of throws the whole theory in a waste basket. The size of the area being affected around the town is 38 hectares.

Seagull
Photo Source:: Stock.xching

One has to wonder what the cause of this bird kill is related to? I would like to think that the birds ate something that killed them, because this would mean that there was probably no threat to humans. Is this the case? I can't say, I am certainly no specialist in the cause of animal deaths, but I do know this, even though seagulls are carnivores, these creatures will eat almost anything, so it is possible that they ate the same thing as the other birds and it killed them also. Seagulls are a lot bigger than the other birds mentioned, so this would probably give them more resistance to a poison, but on the other hand they would probably eat more because of their size. There are so many poisonous substances out there that are either dumped, are byproducts of manufacturing or even put into open garbage cans by home owners. who have no idea that the birds will come down and break garbage bags and eat what is in there. I remember one day when I was waiting in my car outside of a MacDonald's Restaurant, no I never eat there I was waiting for my wife who was in the next store and I needed somewhere to park and I saw this huge flock of black birds all around an enclosure. It turned out that was where the dumpster was and the birds had broken the bags that the food was in and they were having a ball, You could see some of them flying away with large pieces of a hamburger rolls and such. There had to be thousands of birds there. It was an unbelievable sight. These creatures are able to get to anything unless it is in a garbage can and covered, but even this doesn't stop animals like raccoons who will knock over the cans to get to what they think is food.

Is our modern culture causing the lesser creatures a lot of heartache? It certainly looks that way. It seems that more creatures are dying out today than ever before. We continually create garbage and in this garbage is the residue of new types of chemical based compounds that are being discovered every day. Have you ever dumped old medicine into the garbage and out of its container, such as pills? It is possible that some creature might come along and eat these things and it could spell instant death for that creature. Anything that looks or smells like food will attract these birds and animals. An example of this is perfume. Throw it away and the bees and other insects think that they have found a flower bed. Some types of plastics have been known to attract animals who try and eat it. If one were to look through their garbage they might find all sorts of things that are dangerous to animals, including birds. Is it possible that something was thrown out in the dump at Staten Island, New york, that was poison and attracted a certain species of bird, yes quite possible. Could the same thing have happened in Australia in the area of the town I mentioned or perhaps since it was near the seashore, maybe some natural poison in the ocean water killed them. From time to time certain areas of the world get overrun with poisonous algae.

This is a history of things falling from the sky. I am not talking about inanimate objects, I am talking about live and dying creatures. Some of these creatures shouldn't have been in the sky at all. To give you an example of what I am talking about, tn the early 1800s a farmer in Massachusetts had just dug a ditch when it began to rain heavily. He went into his house until the rain stopped. When he came out, the ditch was full of perch. Frogs have fallen from the sky and even sardines. How did they get up there? The theory is that they were sucked up by water spouts and then somehow transported to another location and dropped. A water spout is said to be like a tornado, only over the water. It is hard to watch an animal laying at your feet and suffering in it's death throes. So not only are people upset at the bird falls, they are also upset at the visual impact that these things make on some smaller family members and others. Will this become a world epidemic? Well in a way it seems to be a minor one already, let's hope that it is not a disease of some sort that spreads among the bird community.