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On 1/3/2011 4:07 PM, Helene Van Doninck wrote:
> Getting confused and flying into each other...sounds totally bizarre and
> I don't buy it.
* googling around one finds -
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/04/fireworks-arkansas-blackbird-deaths
- as the most recent account of this episode.
According to this, what happened was collisions during panic due to
fireworks and darkness. Everybody (at least me) has always marveled at
how clumsy startled diurnal Birds are at night, and has wondered if they
could get going fast enough for impacts with branches to harm them, and
of course lethal building strikes by Birds in free flight is a
well-known phenomenon.
What's suggested is that these Birds didn't "fall from the sky" as
recounted by naive observers, but crashed into each other and objects,
with lethal consequence. Of course, with one of those big
feedlot-country blackbird roosts, it wouldn't take a very high frequency
of resulting mortality to amount to 3K. The roar of wings and panic when
a lot of major fireworks went off over one of those roosts must have
been terrifying.
The photo of "One of the thousands of red-winged blackbirds" in he
article is actually of two, suggesting an impaired ability on somebody's
part to count dead Birds - don't ask the Associated Press to your next CBC.
fred schueler
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Frederick W. Schueler & Aleta Karstad
Bishops Mills Natural History Centre - http://pinicola.ca/bmnhc.htm
now in the field on the Thirty Years Later Expedition -
http://fragileinheritance.org/projects/thirty/thirtyintro.htm
Daily Paintings - http://karstaddailypaintings.blogspot.com/
RR#2 Bishops Mills, Ontario, Canada K0G 1T0
on the Smiths Falls Limestone Plain 44* 52'N 75* 42'W
(613)258-3107 <bckcdb at istar.ca> http://pinicola.ca/
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