Another rain of dead birds, 300 miles away from Friday's rain of dead birds

It looks like some sort of phenomenon happened again: "Around 500 dead birds have fallen from the sky in Louisiana, found scattered along a quarter-mile portion of highway in Point Coupee Parish, the AP reports. The discovery is approximately 300 miles south of Beebe, Arkansas, where just days earlier thousands of the same species of birds also fell from the sky."

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

Anonymous

I’m surpised no one has mentioned the Arsenal at Pine Bluff. They hold (or did hold) chemical weapons and also destroyed them.
elk

I smell a gov’t test.
- Anonymous
  
  me too…
  
  Or a zombie virus
bjacques

And there’s meat all over the highway in Mystic, Connecticut.
Anonymous

… and here in Faenza, Italy.
270 birds found dead (turtledoves).
http://www.corriere.it/animali/11_gennaio_07/tortore_faenza_morte_45a07372-1a42-11e0-91c1-00144f02aabc.shtml
genre slur

It would be nice to compare the flock altitudes immediately before descent.
- MandoSpaz
  
  I’m fairly certain that they were both higher before their descent. Does that help at all?
Sean Bonner

At first I was like :\

And then I was like :O
freetard

Dammit, I thought I had that target designation glitch figured out! Back to the drawing board, I guess. At least I know the weapon is effective.
obdan

this is a great day for conspiracy theorists everywhere
Cassandra

I made a map of the dead birds in Google Maps that is publicly accessible.

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&client=firefox-a&ie=UTF8&msa=2

Sorry, but I did not add the dead fish.
Cassandra

You know, I just realized all of these birds are black or dark-colored:

- Jackdaws
- Redwinged Blackbirds
- Black Shearwaters
- Starlings (kind of a blackish brown)
- grikdog
  
  You left out boat-tailed grackles. All goths would wear grackle feathers if it weren’t so gosh darn inhumane. (Grackles are black, but iridescent with dark green and purple tones.)
Anonymous

It’s the Andromeda Swarm.
Sekino

OMG! Oh. My. GOD!! It’s a DOUBLE red-wing blackbird massacre!!! What does it MEAN!!??!!
Ned613

All of these events have occurred near the New Madrid Fault and could be indications of imminent catastrophic seismic activity. If you are living near the NMF you may consider stocking up on canned food, flashlight batteries, generators, medical supplies, ammunition, etc. Basically, everything necessary to survive the coming apocalypse. Also pack some good reading material.

BTW, your welcome.
- Anonymous
  
  You may have a point about the madrid fault; maybe chemicals are leaking from there;
  
  has the weather been unseasonally cold
Anonymous

Apparently this is happening in South America right now as well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdKUcF5RPoA
Anonymous

same happened in Sweden!

http://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=97&artikel=4275269

google translate ppl
Phikus

I suspect fowl play.
WalterSear

Let me guess. It started with regular red birds falling out of the sky, soon followed by blue ones that split into multiple birds, just before impact, then yellow ones, that sped up, and finally big black ones that exploded and mother hens that would just drop eggs and fly away…
oldtaku

You know, these aren’t that far away from Little Rock AFB, which is just SW of Beebe. Getting caught in the boom of one of those high speed (relatively) low noise supersonic planes they’re working on seems like it could do it.

… Oh, and of course it’s based on alien technology!1
milkman

Some reason this scene is stuck in my head…

The life of everyone on board depends upon just one thing: finding someone back there who can not only fly this plane, but who didn’t have fish for dinner.

Maybe blackbirds like fish?
Anonymous

It appears that something similar is happening to the fish of Brazil. Perhaps it is the rapture…

http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.parana-online.com.br%2Feditoria%2Fcidades%2Fnews%2F502434%2F%3Fnoticia%3DMORTANDADE%2BMISTERIOSA%2BDE%2BPEIXES%2BNO%2BLITORAL&act=url
pecoto

Geez…doesn’t anyone read Charles Fort anymore? These kinds of one species spot die-off events have been happening (and being recorded) since the beginning of human history. (and thus, were probably happening loooooonnnng before we were keeping records) It is PROBABLY a naturally caused event. NED613 might be onto something. Maybe there is enough attention being focused on this event that we can finally figure out why these things happen….or at least gather some clues. The autopsies were a solid starting point methinks.
- CLamb
  
  Not unusual–except to urban journalists who haven’t a clue about nature. Several decades ago while driving through a blizzard in rural Ohio my car was hit by several frozen birds falling from the sky. I could see them in the beams of my headlights as well. Unlike human aviators, flocks of birds don’t check the weather forecast before setting out on a trip.
Sork

Have they found any green pigs yet in the rubble?
Anonymous

“300 miles away” equates to ‘just about in the same country’ in most parts of the world; they hardly happened on each others doorsteps.
DangerJackson

Well stocking up on tinned food at Costco is never really a bad idea…
Anonymous

The probably froze high up in the air, died, then thawed out prior to landing.
angusm

It’s the Red-Wing Rapture! Fundamentalist Christians shocked to learn that blackbirds are actually God’s chosen species.
Anonymous

random guess with no evidence-> Chemicals in the fireworks killed the birds (poison fed on by birds picked up by birds from fireworks debris?)

What’s your guess?
Paranatural

I don’t suspect it’s because it’s cold, mostly because it really isn’t cold down here. I had to turn on my AC today. I’m in Baton Rouge, not too far south from all this.
Zan

Can we rule out fireworks now?
Tatsuma

What if…….?

Naaaaahh.
Anonymous

BP
jphilby

The first story I read said 5000. The next story said ‘thousands’. This story says 500.

I guess in times like these a little over-hyping is a necessity to get a story out there, huh? By April 1 it’ll come out that two birds were hit by a car. Oh, and thousands of Yeti bones have been found in Hunan.
Wolfgame

Awwww man … I hope we have an event in NYC so I can have a flash forward too!
Utenzil

Elvis needs birds.
Chaoskitten

Dead birds + dead fish = chemical leak/spill

that’s leak or spill, not leak divided by spill.
Phikus

It’s the arrival of the Adjudicator.
JonStewartMill

My personal hypothesis is that the military is testing a secret weapon — some sort of sonic cannon, maybe.
Shart Tsung

Has this happened before similarly? We still haven’t seen the autopsy report from the first occurrence. Is it safe to say the world is officially ending? Or no?
MarkM

NOW CAN I PANIC?
Anonymous

These should really be plotted on a google map.
osmo

No one will probably notice this (and I cant use the submitterator in chrome) but the same thing just happened here:
http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/article8370375.ab (<– in swedish: basicly allot of crows died in a similar manner as in the case above)
foxtails

Maybe someone who watched Hitchcock in their youth was inspired by the anti-mosquito laser and built an anti-bird laser?
Beryllium

Batten down the hatches, find the nearest supply of Unobtanium, and carefully measure the earth’s magnetic field:

We could be headed for a real-life magnetic field collapse, like in The Core.

(Okay, odds of this being the case are almost zero, but still. This is how it started.)
- Caroline
  
  Except in The Core, the birds crashed into everything during the day, which was stupid because birds can see. At least the blackbirds have the excuse that it was nighttime.
- RedShirt77
  
  Thank you I have been trying to remember what movie that was since this happened.
  
  DOesn’t explain the fish really. But maybe they field is collapsing and we will all be covered in radiation in a matter of weeks.
  - grikdog
    
    Were they flying fish?
angry young man

How sad is it that the show FlashForward, which featured a huge blackbird die off as possibly a test of the tech that led to the titular event, has made so little cultural impact that I may be the first person to remark on the similarity between the show and the die-off?
- Anonymous
  
  FlashForward was the first thing I thought of! Only saw the one episode but it stuck with me. Also Kiki Smith made sculptures of dead crows from bronze and arranged them in a room as if they had fallen from the sky (can’t find the title of the piece, was probably done in the 90′s) I’m considering her a prophet at this point. Black birds are highly intelligent and intuitive with complex social systems and I think we should all book our ticket for the Mothership.
Unmutual

All of these theories are ridiculous. There’s an obvious explanation for what is going on here . . . we’re dealing with some kind of new species of flying cat. Birds everywhere are screwed.
- PBryden
  
  I agree with Unmutual, this is obviously a group of common house cats who have been able to jump to another curve by means of hyper-speed adaptation.
  
  The only flaw in the feline plan was that they should have chosen a mine-site tailings pond for their test flights, as hundreds of birds dead in a chemical-laced dump would hardly raise a feather (sorry)…
bklynchris

Oh, and what about the thousands of fish found dead not too far away?

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/01/04/132621511/arkansas-mysteries-why-did-thousands-of-fish-and-birds-suddenly-die

It’s the end of days………
- Unmutual
  
  Amphibious cats, obviously.
- Anonymous
  
  Clearly it’s spreading. Hundreds of dead fish washed up in New Zealand. http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/4512779/Hundreds-of-snapper-wash-up-on-beaches
arikol

..well, at least it IS the end of days for Beebee, Arkansas!

“this just in, the end of the world is upon us, but seems localized to a small area in the middle of nowhere, USA. Those of you waiting for the Rapture can walk on over!”
- Boba Fett Diop
  
  I’ve got a theory…it could be witches. Some evil witches…
  
  …which is ridiculous, ’cause witches they were persecuted, Wicca good, and love the Earth, and woman power, and I’ll be over here…
Phikus

This happened here in Austin in 2007, as it has in other areas (with different species.) I was working downtown (bird death ground zero) the day it happened. It was nothing that affected humans or other animals in the area. Perhaps the birds and the bees are the canaries in our collective coal mine?

Fodder for evangelical froth for sure.
arikol

OR….
maybe Buffy the vampire slayer was really a reality series with the name of the place changed from Beebee to Sunnydale to protect the guilty…. hmmmmm.

Folks, the Hellmouth has just opened.
Anonymous

Isn’t this how The Road was supposed to start?
Anonymous

Kind of wonder if it is at all related to the white nose death of bats that we were told about last winter. Really sucks.
agave

Odd that it’s the same species of bird
chgoliz

Something they ate, which was affected by the gas spill?

Or is that too obvious a possibility?