Why Did the Birds Die in Arkansas? Bizarre Theories Run the Gamut

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/01/110106-birds-falling-from-sky-bird-deaths-arkansas-science/

Charles Choi

for National Geographic News

Published January 6, 2011

A mysterious rain of thousands of dead birds darkened New Year’s Eve in Arkansas, and this week similar reports streamed in from Louisiana, Sweden, and elsewhere. (See pictures of the Arkansas bird die-off.)

But the in-air bird deaths aren’t due to some apocalyptic plague or insidious experiment—they happen all the time, scientists say. The recent buzz, it seems, was mainly hatched by media hype.

At any given time there are “at least ten billion birds in North America … and there could be as much as 20 billion—and almost half die each year due to natural causes,” said ornithologist Greg Butcher, director of bird conservation for the National Audubon Society in Washington, D.C.

But what causes dead birds to fall from the sky en masse? The Arkansas case points to two common culprits: loud noises and crashes.

Beginning at roughly 11:30 p.m. on New Year’s Eve Arkansas wildlife officers started hearing reports of birds falling from the sky in a square-mile area of the city of Beebe. Officials estimate that up to 5,000 red-winged blackbirds, European starlings, common grackles, and brown-headed cowbirds fell before midnight.

Results from preliminary testing released Wednesday by the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin, show the birds died from blunt-force trauma, supporting preliminary findings released by the Arkansas Livestock and Poultry Commission on Monday.

“They collided with cars, trees, buildings, and other stationary objects,” said ornithologist Karen Rowe of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission.

“Right before they began to fall, it appears that really loud booms from professional-grade fireworks—10 to 12 of them, a few seconds apart—were reported in the general vicinity of a roost of the birds, flushing them out,” Rowe said.

“There were other, legal fireworks set off at the same time that might have then forced the birds to fly lower than they normally do, below treetop level, and [these] birds have very poor night vision and do not typically fly at night.”

The dead birds found in Arkansas are of species that normally congregate in large groups in fall or winter. “The record I’ve heard is 23 million birds in one roost,” Audubon’s Butcher said.

“In that context, 5,000 birds dying is a fairly small amount.”

(Try National Geographic’s online bird identifier.)

A Towering Problem for Birds

Birds often hit objects in flight, especially “tall buildings in cities, or cell phone towers, or wind turbines, or power lines,” Butcher said.

“The structures that seem to cause the most deaths are very tall and constantly lit,” he said. “On foggy nights, birds that should probably normally be paying attention to the stars get disoriented, and circle around the structures until they collapse” and fall.

(Related: “Migrating Birds Reset ‘Compasses’ at Sunset, Study Says.”)

Collisions with power lines seem to have killed roughly 500 blackbirds and starlings in Louisiana on Tuesday. The 50 to 100 jackdaws found on a street in Sweden that same day showed no signs of disease and also apparently died from blunt-force trauma, according to the Swedish National Veterinary Institute.

Wind, snow, hail, lightning, and other challenges posed by weather can easily kill flying birds too.

For example, “last year a couple of hundred pelicans washed up by the Oregon-Washington border,” Butcher said. “A cold front had unexpectedly moved in, and they faced icing on their wings and bodies.”

(Also see “Bird Color Mysteries Explained.”)

Bird-Death Hype Detracts From True Crises?

Of course, death doesn’t just stalk birds from above. For instance, “waterfowl get botulism—and salmonella and avian pox can spread at bird feeders,” Butcher said.

No matter how it arrives, death appears to be very much a fact of life for birds. “Young birds that hatch in the spring have an approximately 75 percent chance of not reaching their first birthdays,” the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission’s Rowe said.

“To biologists, these deaths are normal occurrences.

“I wish I could take all this energy and attention on these deaths and direct them toward true crises in wildlife biology, to things like the white-nose syndrome in bats,” Rowe added.

She does, though, see a silver lining in the sky-is-falling coverage this week.

“I hope we can raise public awareness of what impact man-made structures can have on other species. How many migratory warblers do you want to kill just to get better cell phone reception?”

http://beforeitsnews.com/story/342/227/The_10_Leading_Theories_For_Dead_Birds_And_Fish.html

Nicholas West and Zen Gardner
Activist Post

As the mainstream media attempts to downplay the latest die-off event, which has now gone global, it is worthwhile to keep track of the story lines. Feel free to add your own to the comments section, and we will update accordingly.

Mainstream Explanations: Lightning, hail, mid-air collision, power lines, and New Year fireworks for the birds . . . but disease for the fish. This is even rolling eyes in the mainstream media. Birds are incredibly sensitive to their environment (think canary in the coal mine), and the thought that they were caught by surprise, or that they “fowled” up their flight pattern is patently ridiculous. And where are the roasted birds from this lightning strike? And what about fish dying in the same region? Just a “disease” coincidence. One mainstream headline has to be enshrined as the saddest attempt at sensationalism, while revealing an obvious natural conclusion Falling Birds Likely Died From Massive Trauma. Really?

Meteor showers: We are in a period of intense seasonal meteor showers, and several perennial YouTubers reported hearing sonic booms in the area that could have indicated a local shock wave. This would be one non-conspiratorial, natural cause that actually makes sense, but it is hard to connect to both birds and fish, unless it produced a disabling frequency. There were indeed other sound anomalies according to the report highlighted above.

New Madrid Fault Line: An excellent article by The American Dream collated data about the recent earthquake activity along this fault line that runs along the mid-eastern section of the U.S. Combined with gas fracking, the immense geological activity in the region, and the BP oil drilling disaster, which off-gassed the dispersant, Corexit, into the atmosphere, and we should be wondering about any mass deaths in the region. Nevertheless, this has turned into a global event, so the above could be a side effect of something larger, or a direct contributing factor.

Government testing: The long history of government testing has been exposed by many researchers. The strange component to this die-off is that only certain species have been affected, but within the entire region. And some reports have indicated that the organs of these birds were liquefied, which could indicate a possible virus. Could this implicate species-specific bio-weapons? It is on record that discussions have taken place about race-specific bio-weapons; perhaps this is a test of delivery capability?

GMO mutation: Mike Adams of Natural News sets forth an interesting theory: this latest event is local, but the die-offs are happening across species as bee populations and bats are also declining. Adams points out that Monsanto has a corporate office in Arkansas. Just wondering.

Geoengineering: Could spraying in the area have caused this type of fallout? Perhaps something new added to the mixture? Chemtrails have quickly moved from conspiracy theory to documented fact. So much so, that the powers-that-be have had to admit to the program, but a beneficial one in their view. Between cloud seeding and possible connections to HAARP, chemtrail fallout must be considered, especially as it is being conducted nearly worldwide. Rosalind Peterson has been at the forefront of connecting geoengineering to GMOs as a combined source for oxygen-depleting algae blooms that very well could affect a wide spectrum of natural systems. Furthermore, some believe that the delivery system for chemtrails can also disperse pathogens. If there is a flu or disease outbreak in the coming days or weeks among the human population in areas where the birds have fallen, the chemtrail connection could be made. If this happens, the contagion could be blamed on a new, deadly bird flu. A last possibility connected to chemtrails would be nanoparticles.

HAARP: Birds and fish can be susceptible to subtle frequency alteration. An interesting YouTube post from a long-time fisherman mentioned the “pearl” plate behind the eye of the affected type of drum fish in this event. He made a plea for anyone in the area to look for signs of damage to this plate. Both birds and fish navigate in highly coordinated ways that indicate that they move and communicate via frequencies. Could the HAARP array in Alaska have short-circuited their navigation systems? Or, perhaps this is the beginning of a cascading effect from decades of electromagnetic pollution emanating from EMF and ELF waves shot around the planet via a wide range of modern communications.

Scalar Weapons: These directed energy beam weapons can be deployed via satellite and create a wide range of “natural disasters” that can be tuned to certain frequencies. Their radius is reported to be several miles. Even crazier is that we have been told that the dead birds encountered massive trauma. One of the reported abilities of scalar weapons is to create a Tesla shield of plasma, like a bubble, that could explode anything that enters its airspace. Some have speculated that this technology is in full operation. But what if it truly is still at the testing phase? Remember, this is happening in South America, too.

Project Blue Beam: Were they testing a sound generator for the global theater of alien invasion? This one is “out there” for sure, but NASA itself has announced its preparation for such a scenario. Project Blue Beam, like its counterpart HAARP, uses the natural energy present in the ionosphere as both a visual and acoustical device. Again, perhaps they are not at the ready stage yet, but, like Tesla, have made an unintentional misstep.

Geomagnetic and other Earth changes: As anyone can see from the above range of possibilities, we are facing an array of human tampering. However, the backdrop to this are the anomalies beginning to take form with the apparent wandering of our magnetic pole, as even National Geographic reported that the north magnetic pole is racing toward Russia. Add to this a dwindling magnetosphere and falling oxygen levels and the deaths among more delicate species might portend a larger problem. Finally, an increase in sun activity and magnetic storms might be weakening our overall natural habitat.

The widespread die-off of nature should lead us to look more intently at the world around us, and to question our relationship to it, and our effect upon it. Perhaps this is what we should have been doing all along.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110113131425.htm

New Technique Could Pinpoint ‘Galaxy X’: Satellite Galaxies Located Based on the Ripples They Create in the Hydrogen Gas

ScienceDaily (Jan. 14, 2011) — Planet X, an often-sought 10th planet, is so far a no-show, but Sukanya Chakrabarti has high hopes for finding what might be called Galaxy X — a dwarf galaxy that she predicts orbits our Milky Way Galaxy.

Many large galaxies, such as the Milky Way, are thought to have lots of satellite galaxies too dim to see. They are dominated by “dark matter,” which astronomers say makes up 85 percent of all matter in the universe but so far remains undetected.

Chakrabarti, a post-doctoral fellow and theoretical astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, has developed a way to find “dark” satellite galaxies by analyzing the ripples in the hydrogen gas distribution in spiral galaxies. Planet X was predicted — erroneously — more than 100 years ago based on perturbations in the orbit of Neptune.

Earlier this year, Chakrabarti used her mathematical method to predict that a dwarf galaxy sits on the opposite side of the Milky Way from Earth, and that it has been unseen to date because it is obscured by the intervening gas and dust in the galaxy’s disk. One astronomer has already applied for time on the Spitzer Space Telescope to look in infrared wavelengths for this hypothetical Galaxy X.

“My hope is that this method can serve as a probe of mass distribution and of dark matter in galaxies, in the way that gravitational lensing today has become a probe for distant galaxies,” Chakrabarti said.

Since her prediction for the Milky Way, Chakrabarti has gained confidence in her method after successfully testing it on two galaxies with known, faint satellites. She reported the details of these tests during an oral presentation on Jan. 13, 2011, during a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Wash.

“This approach has broad implications for many fields of physics and astronomy — for the indirect detection of dark matter as well as dark-matter dominated dwarf galaxies, planetary dynamics, and for galaxy evolution driven by satellite impacts,” she said.

Chakrabarti’s colleague Leo Blitz, a UC Berkeley professor of astronomy, said that the method could also help test an alternative to dark matter theory, which proposes a modification to the law of gravity to explain the missing mass in galaxies.

“The matter density in the outer reaches of spiral galaxies is hard to explain in the context of modified gravity, so if this tidal analysis continues to work, and we can find other dark galaxies in distant halos, it may allow us to rule out modified gravity,” he said.

The Milky Way is surrounded by some 80 known or suspected dwarf galaxies that are called satellite galaxies, even though some of them may just be passing through, not captured into orbits around the galaxy. The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are two such satellites, both of them irregular dwarf galaxies.

Theoretical models of rotating spiral galaxies, however, predict that there should be many more satellite galaxies, perhaps thousands, with small ones even more prevalent than large ones. Dwarf galaxies, however, are faint, and some of the galaxies may be primarily invisible dark matter.

Chakrabarti and Blitz realized that dwarf galaxies would create disturbances in the distribution of cold atomic hydrogen gas (H I) within the disk of a galaxy, and that these perturbations could reveal not only the mass, but the distance and location of the satellite. The cold hydrogen gas in spiral galaxies is gravitationally confined to the plane of the galactic disk and extends much farther out than the visible stars — sometimes up to five times the diameter of the visible spiral. The cold gas can be mapped by radio telescopes.

“The method is like inferring the size and speed of a ship by looking at its wake,” said Blitz. “You see the waves from a lot of boats, but you have to be able to separate out the wake of a medium or small ship from that of an ocean liner.”

The technique Chakrabarti developed involves a Fourier analysis of the gas distribution determined by high-resolution radio observations. Her initial predication of Galaxy X around the Milky Way was made possible by a wealth of data already available on the atomic hydrogen in our galaxy. To test her theory on other galaxies, she and her collaborators used recent data from a radio survey called The HI Nearby Galaxy Survey (THINGS), conducted by the Very Large Array, as well as its extension to the Southern Hemisphere, THINGS-SOUTH, a survey carried out by the Australia Telescope Compact Arra

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110113131425.htm