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What
killed the Beebe birds?
Thousands
fell from the sky at once
Preliminary autopsies
on 17 of the up to 5,000 blackbirds that fell on this town indicate
they died of blunt trauma to their organs, the state's top veterinarian
said Monday.
Their stomachs were empty, which rules out poison, Dr. George Badley
said,
and they died in midair, not on impact with the ground.
That evidence, and the fact that the red-winged blackbirds fly in close
flocks, suggests
they suffered some massive midair collision, he added. That lends
weight to theories that
they were startled by something.
Residents of the small town of Beebe,
Arkansas awoke Saturday to find thousands of
dead blackbirds littering a 1.5-square-mile area. The birds
inexplicably dropped dead,
landing on homes, cars and lawns.
The director of Cornell University's
ornithology lab in Ithaca, N.Y., said the most likely
suspect is violent weather. It's probable that thousands of birds were
asleep, roosting
in a single tree, when a "washing machine-type thunderstorm" sucked
them up into the air,
disoriented them, and even fatally soaked and chilled them.
In Oklahoma, we have violent thunderstorms from April until October
and we've never lost 5,000 birds in one night.
Someone else suggested fireworks scared then (New Years Eve,)
like every state doesn't shoot fireworks at New Years?
The only thing like this I ever saw was when BP put poison in the Gulf to break up
their spilled oil and southern Louisiana towns started losing birds and crops.
Creepy - like a Hitchcock movie come to life.