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MASS BIRD DEATHS NOT UNCOMMON
Thursday, January 6th, 2011 -- 2:06 pm
Posted by Riley Hebert-News Director
 Birds falling from the sky, fish washing up on shore… headlines this week have led many to speculate the End Times may be upon us.
"These sorts of things have happened," explains DNR Conservation Warden Adam Hanna. He says the events are more likely a sign that birds aren’t that bright or that they've come in contact with toxins.
"These birds will all land on one field. Let's say they stop on some field that's been sprayed with some chemical. Then they get going, they get this chemical pumping through their blood. Then, all of a sudden, it could hit them all at the same time and they die," Hanna says.
The hypothesis in the Louisiana case is the birds—about 5,000 Red-Winged Blackbirds—were startled by fireworks and started flying into each other, buildings and trees.
Hanna recalls a documented case of some Cedar Waxwings who consumed fermented berries and became, for lack of a better term, hammered.
"They basically got drunk and flew into the sides of dorm buildings. We're talking the same story: people had to go pick up, basically, truckloads of birds that were killed because of drunk flying," he says.
Birds have very small brains. Plus, their small systems just can’t handle pollutants very well, which makes them, frogs and fish nature’s alarm system for pollution.
"Especially thing around water. Pretty much everything dissolves in water," Hanna says.
For instance, while it didn’t get as much publicity, there were 4,000 corpses of waterfowl found floating in the Mississippi River near La Crosse in November.
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