Big booms suspected in blackbirds’ deaths

Theory: Loud noises killed Beebe birds

— For a time, it looked as if the central Arkansas town of Beebe was the site of a New Year’s Eve remake of the Alfred Hitchcock thriller The Birds. But this time the birds, not people, were dying - by the thousands.

Preliminary necropsy findings on 17 of the birds indicated they died from internal bleeding caused by bluntforce trauma, “like running into something,” Pat Badley, Arkansas’ state veterinarian, said Monday.

An estimated 4,000 to 5,000 birds - mostly redwinged blackbirds but alsosome starlings and grackles - died in the White County community late Friday night, said Karen Rowe, bird conservation program coordinator for the Game and Fish Commission.

Authorities now are theorizing that extremely loud noises likely startled the birds that had been roosting near Beebe’s Windwood subdivision, causing them to fly into the darkness and crash into objects.

Worsening the situation, blackbirds are flocking creatures with poor night vision, Rowe said.

“They will follow [each other] just like a school of fish,” Rowe said.

Mike Overstreet, who has talked with Rowe and who lives in the Windwood neighborhood, said Monday that between 5 and 6 p.m. Friday, he noticed “swarms of blackbirds ... coming over to our neighborhood.”

“Any direction you could look, it was just a black wave of birds. ... It lasted for well over an hour,” he recalled. He said he assumed the birds went to roost in a wooded area nearby.

Shortly after 10 p.m., Overstreet heard “10 or 12” loud noises.

“I would almost call them explosions,” he said. “They were extremely loud, almostwindow-rattling loud.”

Moments later, he heard “a few thumps” on his house, got a flashlight and went back outside, where he “saw the birds were flying really low ... just a few feet off the ground.”

“The thumping that I heard was them bouncing off everything in this neighborhood - mailboxes, cars, houses ... everything in sight,” Overstreet said.

He remembered Hitchcock’s 1963 suspense horror film in which birds begin inexplicably attacking people in Bodega Bay, Calif.

“That was the first thing that popped into my head,” Overstreet said, because the birds “were pelting the front of the house.”

“It was a little bit unnerving. But after it was over with, it was just sad,” he said.

He looked down and saw “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds” of birds scattered about on the ground.

“Not all of them were dead,” he said. Many were “running around with broken wings, broken legs” and other injuries. Some were unconscious and rolled back upright when he touched them with a shoe.

An oak tree across the street “looked like a giant net. There were so many birds in it, it was unreal,” he said.

He looked up. Birds were on power lines; three were hanging from his son’s basketball net.

Overstreet said, “I did not know what to think or to say or to do. It was just surreal. It was hard to watch.”

He believes the explosive noises scared the birds from their roosting site.

Rowe said the “working hypothesis” is that the birds didn’t fly higher because they were trying to avoid the “bottle rockets” and other New Year’s Eve fireworks.

“The injuries are consistent with the fact that the birds collided with the ground and objects. ... The internal organs of the birds look healthy, except for the trauma marks,” Rowe said.

Game and Fish Commission spokesman Keith Stephens said there were no signs of infectious diseases.

Saturday morning after the sun rose, Overstreet went back outside to survey the situation. By then, he said, “probably a good 60 or 70 percent of the birds that were on the ground the night before were gone.”

He said he believes most of them were able to get back up and fly away.

Beebe Police Chief Wayne Ballew said Monday that he, too, heard the loud noises but believes they came from near the Windwood subdivision, not the east side of Beebe as Overstreet thinks.

Ballew said no one contacted police about the noises, which he thinks were just extremely loud fireworks. “I think it was just people having a good time on New Year’s Eve,” he said.

Badley said toxicology, virology and bacteriology tests also will be conducted and will take up to a week.

“We expect all those tests to be negative, but we’re doing them just in case,” he said.

Badley noted that some people use propane-operated cannons to scare crows away from crops. But Rowe said such cannons are fired in daylight hours, rather than night, so that the birds can see when they fly away.

Because blackbirds “are a nuisance sometime,” the noises “could have been [done] on purpose to try to get rid of the birds,” Badley said. But he added, “I don’t know if it was on purpose or not.”

“We have no reason to think it was intentional,” Rowe said.

The dead birds were not among those fully protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, so the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has decided not to open an investigation, Rowe said.

Rowe and Badley said the current theory is more plausible than previous speculation that hail or lightning killed the birds.

Willie Gilmore, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in North Little Rock, said most of the state’s severe weather had moved out of central Arkansas by 6 p.m. Friday.

Members of an online bird-chat group were aflutter with comments on the bird deaths over the weekend and Monday.

Kim Smith, a University of Arkansas at Fayetteville biological sciences professor who administers the group, said blackbirds tend to roost at sunset. Smith said that “suggests that something had spooked the roost.”

And Paul Slota, a spokesman for the National Wildlife Health Center Lab in Madison, Wis., said authoritieshave “seen mortality rates like this before” in birds.

Slota said the center has seen about 16 events where more than 1,000 birds died over the past 20 to 30 years.

But Kevin McGowan at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, N.Y., said such mass deaths of birds are rare.

“Almost never,” he said. “It’s a very strange thing.”

McGowan said the fireworks theory “seems to be a logical explanation.”

“Those birds shouldn’t have been flying at night. Something scared them off their perches,” he said. “Flying like that, it’s even worse than running in the darkness if you can’t see where you’re going.”

Birds don’t congregate as much in the summer as in the winter, he said.

“There’s a saying, ‘If you scare a single cow, no problem. You scare a crowd, you get a stampede,’” McGowan said. “Same here: If you scare a crowd of birds, you get a stampede.”

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 01/04/2011

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