BEEBE, Ark. — 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 told NBC News on 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.
Earlier Monday, the estimated number of dead birds was raised to between 4,000 and 5,000, up sharply from the initial estimate of 1,000.
Keith Stephens, a spokesman for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, provided the new numbers.
Residents of the small town of Beebe 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.
Violent weather rumbled over much of the state Friday, including a tornado that killed three people in Cincinnati, Ark. Lightning could have killed the birds directly or startled them to the point that they became confused. Hail also has been known to knock birds from the sky.
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.
“Bad weather can occasionally catch flocks off guard, blow them off a roost, and they get hurled up suddenly into this thundercloud,” lab director John Fitzpatrick said.
Rough weather had hit the state earlier Friday, but the worst of it was already well east of Beebe by the time the birds started falling, said Chris Buonanno, a forecaster with the National Weather Service in North Little Rock.
If weather was the cause, the birds could have died in several ways, Fitzpatrick said. They could easily become disoriented — with no lights to tell them up and down — and smack into the ground. Or they could have died from exposure.
The birds’ feathers keep them at a toasty 103 degrees, but “once that coat gets unnaturally wet, it’s only a matter of minutes before they’re done for,” Fitzpatrick said.
Lightning or hail are also possibilities.
Karen Rowe, an ornithologist for the state commission, noted that in 2001 lightning killed about 20 mallards at Hot Springs, and a flock of dead pelicans was found in the woods about 10 years ago. Lab tests showed that they, too, had been hit by lightning.
Moreover, in 1973 hail knocked birds from the sky at Stuttgart, Ark. Some of the birds were caught in a violent storm’s updrafts and became encased in ice before falling from the sky.
Rowe noted that birds of prey and other animals, including dogs and cats, ate several of the dead blackbirds and suffered no ill effects.
“Every dog and cat in the neighborhood that night was able to get a fresh snack that night,” Rowe said.
Mike Robertson, the mayor in Beebe, said the last dead bird was removed about 11 a.m. Sunday in the town about 40 miles northeast of Little Rock. A dozen workers hired by the city to do the cleanup wore environmental-protection suits for the task.
Robertson said the workers wore the suits as a matter of routine and not out of fear that the birds might be contaminated.
“It started at 7 a.m., picking up birds on the street, in the yards, been run over. It’s just a mess,” Beebe Street Department supervisor Milton McCullar told WISC-TV.
Several hundred thousand red-winged blackbirds have used a wooded area in the town as a roost for the past several years.
Robertson and other officials went to the roost area over the weekend and found no dead birds on the ground.
“That pretty much rules out an illness” or poisoning, the mayor said.
But some residents voiced concerns.
“I’ve been to Iraq and back and not seen nothing like this,” Beebe resident Jeff Drennan told local Fox16 News on Sunday.
UPDATE
First, New Year’s Eve fireworks were blamed in central Arkansas for making thousands of blackbirds confused, crashing into homes, cars and each other. Then 300 miles to the south in Louisiana, power lines likely killed about 450 birds, littering a highway near Baton Rouge.
It’s almost certainly a coincidence the events happened within days of each other, Louisiana’s state wildlife veterinarian Jim LaCour said Tuesday. “I haven’t found anything to link the two at this point.”
Up to 100,000 dead fish on Ark. River
To add to the mystery, 50-100 jackdaws, a bird species in the crow family, fell dead in central Sweden late Tuesday night, English-language Swedish news website The Local reported Wednesday.
“We do not know what the cause is,” Skovde police commander Tomas Ahlgren said. The birds fell in the city of Falkoping, which is southeast of Skovde.
Mass bird deaths aren’t uncommon. The U.S. Geological Service’s website listed about 90 mass deaths of birds and other wildlife from June through Dec. 12.
There were five deaths of at least 1,000 birds, with the largest near Houston, Minnesota, where parasite infestations killed about 4,000 water birds between Sept. 6 and Nov. 26.
In Louisiana, the birds died sometime late Sunday or early Monday in the rural Pointe Coupee Parish community of Labarre, about 30 miles northwest of Baton Rouge.
The birds — a mixed flock of red-winged blackbirds, brown-headed cowbirds, grackles and starlings — may have hit a power line or vehicles in the dark, LaCour said. Two dozen of them had head, neck, beak or back injuries.
About 50 dead birds were near a power line 30 or 40 feet from Louisiana Highway 1. About a quarter-mile away, a second group of 400 or more stretched from the power line and across the highway, he said.
Dan Cristol, a biology professor and co-founder of the Institute for Integrative Bird Behavior Studies at the College of William & Mary, said the Louisiana birds may have been ill or startled from their roost, then hit the power line.
“They don’t hit a power line for no reason,” he said.
In Beebe, New Year’s revelers spent the holiday weekend cleaning up dead red-winged blackbirds.
Some speculated that bad weather was to blame. Others said one confused bird could have led the group in a fatal plunge. A few spooked schoolkids guessed the birds committed mass suicide.
Officials acknowledged, though, they may never know exactly what caused the large number of deaths.
Cristol was skeptical of the fireworks theory, unless “somebody blew something into the roost, literally blowing the birds into the sky.”
Wildlife officials in both Arkansas and Louisiana sent carcasses to researchers at the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis. and the University of Georgia.
LaCour said he didn’t expect results for at least two or three weeks.
In 1999, several thousand grackles fell from the sky and staggered about before dying in north Louisiana. It took five months to get the diagnosis: an E. coli infection of the air sacs in their skulls.
“I hope things go faster than that,” said Paul Slota, branch chief for the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin. He said necropsies of the Arkansas birds began Tuesday afternoon.
“If it isn’t strictly trauma, it may take more time to get results back,” he said. “When nothing shows up, you run the tests longer and let it incubate longer.”
The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission is also trying to determine what caused the deaths of up to 100,000 fish over a 20-mile stretch of the Arkansas River near a dam in Ozark, 125 miles west of Beebe. The fish were discovered on Dec. 30.
The commission expects results on the fish tests in probably a month. Disease may be the culprit, since almost all the fish were one species — bottom-feeding drum, the commission said.
Keith Stephens, a commission spokesman, said the events do not appear to be related. Both that section of the river and the air at the site of the bird deaths were tested for toxins, Stephens said.
As for the dead birds in Sweden, a county veterinarian would not speculate on the cause of their death, The Local reported. He was traveling to the site Wednesday to investigate.
“We will work quietly and methodically,” he said.
