Dead birds, fish kills update: 8,000 turtle doves fall from the sky in Italy
The ongoing reports of dead birds and fish is continuing to make headlines in the UK and around the world.
On Saturday evening, the London-based Daily Mail posted a major story updating the mass animal kill story. The latest report is on 8,000 turtle doves that fell from the sky in Italy. That happened in the town of Faenza, in northern Italy. This latest bird kill was the largest number of mass animal kills in Europe. As previously reported, 50 dead birds were found in Sweden earlier this week.
Magnetic pole shift, magnetic field change as the cause of the bird kills?
The Daily Mail story touches on a theory that has caused a lot of buzz on the Internet. That theory is that some of the bird kills could be the result of a shift in the magnetic field. The birds rely on magnetic fields for navigation. The north pole has been shifting by as much as 25 miles per year. Experts say further testing will need to be done to determine whether the shifting magnetic fields played any part in the animal deaths.
Should we be alarmed about the recent cases and are they connected?
The consensus among scientists is no and no.
In an article posted online Saturday in the Wall Street Journal's Web site Saturday, Paul Slota, spokesman for the U.S. Geological Survey, which has been tracking mass animal deaths since the 1970s, told the paper that mass animal deaths are not uncommon.
"In the last 10 years we have logged 188 cases just involving birds with mortality exceeding 1,000 animals per event," the USGS expert told the WSJ.
See also the Associated Press video on the left. Other experts echoed that opinion to the AP.
More evidence is surfacing every day that the reports of massive dead birds and fish that were found in Arkansas, Louisiana, Nashville, Tennessee and overseas in Sweden, Brazil, New Zealand and the UK are not unusual. Thousands of dead crabs washed on shore in England but UK authorities say that cold weather is most likely to blame.
The USGS says mass animal kills happens regularly in nature and some of the deaths could also be related to toxins and loud noise produced by man. The mass bird deaths in Arkansas are thought to be the result of loud noise from New Years fireworks.
You can read the USGS report for yourself in this link.
The Washington Post reported on Friday that the 2 million dead fish that were found in Maryland may be the result of unusually cool weather.
"It's colder than it's been in 25 years," Dawn Stoltzfus, a spokeswoman for the Maryland Department of the Environment told the Post. "That's terrible news for the (fish). In 1976, 15 million were killed during a cold snap"
The BBC is also debunking the conspiracy theories which blame the dead birds and fish on everything from BP to a sign from God. One biblical scholar, Harold Camping, has predicted the end of the world will be on May 21, 2011. That has caused more to suspect that the bird and fish kills could be a precursor to the apocalypse. Some have jokingly called it the "aflockalypse."
The BCC concludes, "But experts insist that what is going on is pretty common and that the incidents are unconnected."
Could we be hearing more about mass bird and fish kills because there is more reporting of the kills in the media?
Comments
i agree about the magnetic shift...i also think that theres something to the story to the mayans calender ending next year aswell.........spooky
They are not "KILLS" Nobody went out and "KILLED" them , why do you have to make it sound like that.
They are "DEATHS" if or in your pathetic sensationalist style "MYSTERY DEATHS".
Learn to use language in a more reasonable way!
It's the U.S government using sonic pulses as an experiment to see have powerful and effective it would be on bringing down aircraft. It might sound far fetched at first but if you think about it, it makes sense especialy after what happened to the Twin Towers.
It's a little ridiculous that the media is calling this "Usual".
This is ANYTHING but "usual".
It's also an insult to our intelligence to report that fireworks caused the death of the birds in Arkansas.
You got some grammar mistakes there Sir. I recomend you to spell check your articles :)
if you actually translate the article from the REAL Italy news you can see your data is off .. it states they found 700 -thousand dead birds. Stop adding zeros! and not only that the state in which they found these birds was not like the other cases.. why does everyone keep trying to connect everything.. if you look more into their new site you can see that bird deaths and other animal mass deaths are not uncommon in Italy at all! Why keep posting the same stories over and over again? move on people!
I believe the last part is true(snowball effect), but it is still very odd that there is such a abundance of large bird deaths and fish within such a short time frame.
As well I do not believe the world is coming to an end
and if im wrong, oh well, it wont matter then.
No one can predict when the world will end. If God wanted it to, it would have already happened long before now. People need to quit trying to come up with all these theories and predictions because it isn't up to them to judge. This is not our world anyway, so why spend your time trying to figure out when the world's gonna end?
I am 59 years old and fire works never killed birds before so why now? Plus before the internet , before TV something called radio spread the news. It was before i was born but even then people got international news. Someone said scientists say they can see no connection between-all the deaths so it must be coincidence. Are these scientists without brains? Maybe we should get scientists with brains to speak.
I agree. I recently read that these signs are part of Bible prophecy concerning the end.
http://facingend.wordpress.com/2011/01/06/omen/
And how north pole moving is also mentioned(?) in the Bible.
http://facingend.wordpress.com/2011/01/09/speculations/
It also points out 2012 theories are not true, but at the same time Bible tells this is the end times? I like how it was balanced.
Blaming the mass animal death on BP may not be as much a conspiracy as some think. The oil is still there, floating bellow the surface, seriously disrupting the currents and mainly the Gulf Stream. Which consequences a colder Gulf Stream can have on the Global Weather is not such a mystery!
A tragedy yes, but not a mystery >>
The dead birds and the Gulf Stream: http://make-sustainable-choices.com/2011/01/13/dead-birds-aggressive-birds/
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