Posted on 01/05/2011 10:39:40 AM PST by TaraP
STOCKHOLM (AFP) – In a week that saw unexplained massive bird deaths in the southern United States, up to 100 birds were found lying in a snow-covered street in Sweden Wednesday, officials said.
"Most were dead," Christer Olofsson of rescue services in the southwestern town of Falkoeping said of the 50 to 100 jackdaw birds, a type of crow.
Ornithologist Anders Wirdheim said the find was surprising.
"This is unusual," he told tabloid Aftonbladet, which posted online a reader's photo of dozens of black birds littering a snow-covered road.
"They are probably jackdaws. They spend the winter in large flocks. If they are exposed to disturbances, they can become so stressed that they fly themselves to death," he said.
Olofsson told AFP the birds were first spotted around midnight by a police patrol, and that five had been taken in for analysis.
Olov Andersson of the National Veterinary Institute told news agency TT the carcasses would be analysed and that bacterial and viral tests, including for swine flu, would be performed.
The Falkoeping incident comes after two unexplained mass bird deaths in the United States.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
I was trying to come up with Cthulhu Mythos angle, myself...
“What internet service did you have in 1990?”
Arpanet and usenet, and I was signed up for three bbs services for news and fractal graphics. Usenet started in 1979 and was pretty widely used by 1980. BBS systems were running by ‘76 or ‘78 or so and most were specialized (BBS has been discussed as an alternate to WWW should the governments crack down on Web discussion).
These were all text-based dialup services with modems (remember modems? lol)unless you were at a place tied to Arpanet trunks. Later in the ‘80s you could telnet in.
You are correct that the graphics-heavy WWW was not there, nor were specific “browsers” but you could telnet in or dial in to a server.
Way back then, people could coordinate meteor shower falls or bolide falls using usenet, and could aggregate news stories from many sources, especially if many people were interested in a given topic and would feed info to the nets. It was a lot like Free Republic, groups of people with a common interest could form a group and share data pretty much globally if you could get something like a TTY43 terminal.
While I used Arpanet mostly for data transfers and geeky stuff, there was quite a lot of “news” and discussion.
So if people noticed fish kills and bird falls and posted the news, you could gain a perspective over a wide geo area and time span.
I had a coal-fired computer, the steam pipes got really hot. I programmed in Onetran.
Ok, dead birds and fish suddenly showing up all over the US, Sweden, Italy and elsewhere ... dude ... I’m seriously getting really creaped out by this.
“No, they actually don’t.”
What do they find there?
I think you know my point though. Less than 100,000 people world wide would have had the set up you would have had.
These stories of bird deaths are read by millions today. The information is in the hands of casual browsers and users.
This is a sea change to how information is dispersed. 20 years ago, you had to know what you were looking for, now you just stumble across tons of unrelated news.
That kind of stuff!
“Eventually, someone will theorize that....”It’s Bush’s fault.”
You know, Godwin’s Rule (about the Nazis and the internet) immortalized Godwin.
maybe we need to call the other phenomenon Verity’s Rule- in any internet discussion of world events, eventually someone will bring up the issue that it’s all Bush’s Fault.
Those look delicious
That is very very very painful to watch.
Thank you.
“I think you know my point though. Less than 100,000 people world wide”. I won’t quibble over how many people. Usenet sometimes seemed pretty crowded, though.
Way back then, it was possible for researchers and interested people to use “modern” technology to get a closer-to-real-time situational awareness, rather than waiting for a scroll from a monestary with last year’s sunspot counts.
The news people can influence public opinion by publicizing every bird and fish odd event, and they sometimes relish doing so. Like the shark attack summer, when real attacks were less than previous years but news accounts were up by a factor of four or so.
Disease?
Anytime. :)
back at ya..........
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-WDSp4vGp0&NR=1
“I was thinking ‘death panels’ myself”
They all had end of life counseling and signed a no resusitation order.
Seriously there has to be something going on. Not just lightening strikes or hail storms. That just does not sound plausible. How about aluminum oxide which is one of the chemicals they are spraying in all those lovely chemtrails we see over our neighborhood.
Now you’re talking. Also like the Cramps version.
There are many of us who used the Internet back in the 1970s and 1980s. The WWW is relatively new. I actively used Compuserve daily from the late 1970s (on a 300 baud modem). In the 1980s I was using Prodigy (one of their beta users when it first appeared). I don't doubt that many Freepers were ahead of the public at large in being online.
At least the apes are not dropping dead. Ooops. Spoke too soon.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.