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 ...
Oh balls!
Considering the state of “journolism” I’d just say this is a case of reporters dredging up any unusual wildlife news here and around the world to get us going. I’m wondering if what’s going on is all that statistically unusual or if the only thing unusual is all the attention being paid to it.
Just a year ago this would all be proof positive of Global Warming and that’s what the headlines would lead with. Recall that stories about unusually aggressive behavior on the part of stingrays (in the wake of Steve Irwin’s death) was being dredged up a few years ago and being put forward as being somehow caused by Global Warming.
This could just as easily be a harbinger of the next 9/11. Recall the summer of 2001 being full of stories of shark attacks. All we need is for another petty political sex scandal (Chandra Levy) and we’re gonna git bombs.
I suspect that this is not really that uncommon, but is making the news.
Though the story line “the birds got scared and had a heart attack” is BS.
Maybe there was a yellow-bellied blackbird in there somewhere.
SnakeDoc
Were they dead or just pining for the fjords?
“...the bees know.....”
Thousands of dead crabs have washed up along the Kent coast, with environmental experts believing the cold weather in Britain is to blame.
The Velvet swimming crabs - also called devil crabs - are thought to be victims of Britain's coldest December in 120 years, which left sea temperatures much lower than average.
Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1344242/40-000-devil-crabs-washed-British-beach-freezing-conditions-hypothermia.html
I expect a liberal is going to blame this as Earth’s reaction to a Republican controlled House.
maybe they’re just bored
See - if we hadn't switched to less-polluting cars and kept warming the planet, this never would have happened! We made it too cold!
Liberalism kills (crabs).
Paleomagnetics finds stripes of opposing magnetic polarity in seafloor spreading regions, leading some to the conclusion that the magnetic field was in a particular direction when the rock hardened. You see the same thing in some volcanic deposits.
In the lab, you can melt basalt, expose it to a mag field, and then cool it. The imposed field will be locked in.
This sort of thing, an observation in nature backed up with empirical data taken under controlled conditions, fools a lot of people.
“Think about this. 20 years ago if these incidences had happened, would anyone have been able to link them?”
In 1990, you mean? Oh, I think we could’ve managed to make the connect even “way back then.” :)
GEAPRESS - There are certainly many hundreds, probably thousands, the collared dove who are dying at this moment in Faenza.
Would have heard about the Swedish story “way back then”? Likely not. Unless CNN decided to carry it, there was no way you would have heard about it.
It has to be space aliens, I tell you! It’s probably the same bunch that travels light years across the galaxy to autopsy beef cattle and do anal probes of human abductees. Or maybe it’s some new aerial species of the chupacabra. We’re probably doomed.
The mass death of birds has reached Sweden.
The U.S. has already dropped thousands of dead from the sky.
- I thought immediately that there must be a connection, “said Drilon Hulaj, 23, who discovered hundreds of dead birds in the middle of the street in Falkirk last night.
Streets, rooftops and lawns were covered by thousands of black birds in Beebe Arkansas in the United States on New Year’s Day.
And now, the mass death reached Sweden. On the way home from work late last night saw Drilon Hulaj and his peers colleagues suddenly to the street in front of them was studded with black fågellik, probably jackdaws.
Swedish site source:http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/article8370375.ab
Add Illinois to the list??
Residents around Marion, Illinois have also found dead birds in recent days. A cluster of households in the same family that living close together in rural Marion reported finding dead birds in their yards around the same time as the Beebe, AR dead birds.
Source is AP: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/6185536/dead_birds_reported_by_residents_in.html?cat=8
Now, everybody, GO PANIC!!! w00t!
The birds are running into the debt ceiling.
Why not? We had TV, radio, newspapers, Internet...we weren’t living in the Stone Age...
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