Apocalypse, now?

What’s up with thousands of birds inexplicably falling from the sky on New Year’s Eve? Five Thousand!  It literally rained dead birds in a 1.5 square mile of Beebe, Arkansas. Cars,  roofs and roads were littered with bird carcasses and it all happened in a span of less than 60 minutes.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night

Scientists in Little Rock, and now the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, WI,  are attempting to determine if firework noise, foul weather or something natural caused the carnage. That’s all the theory they have come up with so far; other than it was just a frenzied flock that fortuitously steered itself into the Earth. Either way, 3 to 5,000 red-winged blackbirds (and a few starlings) fell to the ground Friday night and all we know is that the birds of a feather died of blunt-force trauma.  But did the fatalities occur before or after they hit terra firma?  No one can say for certain. 

Take these broken wings

But we do know that, a day later and 120 miles west, 100,000 drum fish are found floating, defunct, along a 20 mile stretch of the Arkansas River. Two days after that, 500 more red-winged blackbirds scattered the ground, some 300 miles south of Beebe, in Labarre, LA.  in a  seemingly similar scenario to the NYE scene. 

WTH? Doesn’t this freak anybody else out? Even a little?

UPDATE: Sweden now too.