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New Year’s Surprise: 4,000 Dead Blackbirds
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
Times Square had the ball drop, and Brasstown, N.C., had its descending possum. But no place had a New Year’s Eve as unusual — and downright disturbing — as Beebe, Ark.

About 10 p.m. Friday, thousands of red-winged blackbirds began falling out of the sky over this town about 35 miles northeast of Little Rock. They landed on roofs, roads, front lawns and backyards, turning the ground nearly black and scaring anyone who happened to be outside.

“One of them almost hit my best friend in the head,” said Christy Stephens, who was standing outside among the smoking crowd at a New Year’s Eve party. “We went inside after that.”

The cause is still being determined, said Keith Stephens, a spokesman for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. Of the more than 4,000 birds that fell on Beebe, 65 samples have been sent to labs, one in Arkansas, the other in Wisconsin. Some results may be available as soon as Monday, Mr. Stephens said.

For now, state officials are speculating that the birds may have died as a result of stress, startled by fireworks in the area, or perhaps by lightning. But, Mr. Stephens acknowledged that the cause may never be known.

It is, he said, the biggest case like this that he is aware of.

“About 19 years ago, we had some ducks,” he said, “but that was only a couple of dozen.”

The town contacted an environmental cleanup firm, which by Monday afternoon had picked up nearly all of the bird carcasses, some of which had been bagged and left by residents at the end of driveways. A few calls were still coming in, said Tracy Lightfoot, who sits on the City Council, but that was no surprise given how many birds had dropped out of the sky.

“It just looked as if it had rained birds,” he said, declining to speculate on the reason. “There’s lots of theories running around. I have no idea. I just don’t have a clue.”

One thing is almost certain: the bird drop is not related to the 83,000 fish that died a few days earlier in the western part of the state, the biggest fish kill in Arkansas that anyone can remember. They were spotted by anglers last week and reported to the Game and Fish Commission, which spent New Year’s Eve measuring and counting dead fish that had spread out for nearly 20 miles.

In that case, the victims were almost all drum, and almost all younger ones. That suggests the culprit was disease, said Mark Oliver, the commission’s chief of fisheries. He said that fish kills were not uncommon, especially in winter when fish are packed more closely, but he did not recall one of this size.

State officials have sent samples of dying, but not yet dead, fish to the fish disease lab at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, which could take a couple of weeks to reach conclusions.

The likelihood of a connection between dead fish in a river on one side of the state and dead birds from the sky in another is pretty much nil (nor is there any connection between these events and the yearlong swarm of mini-earthquakes in the center of the state).

But it is all rather odd.

Becky Short, who also sits on the City Council, said that in addition to the controversial fireworks theory, people have already begun joking about the biblical end times and U.F.O.’s.

Her conclusion was simpler.

“Looks like some sort of phenomenon happened,” she said.

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dynomite said:
damn dude.  this is like the third or fourth post on this

pay attention

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