Come on!

On January 1 in Falling From the Sky, I shared with you the odd news story coming out of Arkansas about a number of black birds who mysteriously fell dead out of the sky. Initially, no one had a clue as to what might have happened. There merely were some wild guesses.

Today, however, we have received the "official" word. According to a CNN report:

Experts believe a loud noise or event was behind the mass death of as many as 5,000 red-winged blackbirds and starlings in Arkansas on New Year's Eve, when they all flew into buildings at night, veterinarian Dr. John Fischer said Wednesday.

Fischer, of the Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study in Athens, Georgia, said the bang startled very large roosts in a square-mile area in Beebe, Arkansas, 40 miles northeast of Little Rock...

I'm sorry, but that answer is crazy! If loud noises -- like those of fireworks -- are to blame, then why haven't there been similar incidents around the country every year on July 4 and December 31? Beebe is a sleepy little town of around 3,000 people. It is hard for me to fathom that someone could shoot off enough fireworks to cause this level of damage.

There are many large cities that host major fireworks' displays on Independence Day every year. Out west, Portland and Seattle host such displays that are major financial undertakings and that last a good 60 minutes in length. We've never had circumstances of this ilk. Why then would teeny Beebe, Arkansas cause such damage?

As the CNN report continues,

In a separate incident 450 miles south of Beebe, some 500 red-winged blackbirds, starlings and sparrows were found dead Monday morning on streets in the southern Louisiana community of Labarre.

Fischer told CNN Wednesday that X-rays of those birds found hemorrhaging consistent with traumatic death, and the birds apparently flew into stationary objects and power lines...

And there's even more information to cause one to be a bit suspicious. While the black birds were dying in Beebe, a report came in that, about 100 miles to the west, there was a major and unexplained fish kill in the Arkansas River. Near the town of Ozark, over 100,000 fish inexplicably died suddenly. What is going on here?

The problem with flimsy explanations is that it can give rise to some rather sinister (and wacky) reports. Here's one a friend of mine sent to me today.

A shocking report prepared for Prime Minister Putin by the Foreign Military Intelligence Directorate (GRU) states that one of the United States top experts in biological and chemical weapons was brutally murdered after he threatened to expose a US Military test of poison gas that killed hundreds of thousands of animals in Arkansas this past week.

According to this report, John P. Wheeler III, Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force, Washington, D.C. from 2005-2008, when he became the Special Assistant to the Acting Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Installations, Logistics and Environment, was found brutally murdered and dumped in a landfill...

Could this be true or is it merely some wild conspiracy theory? I dunno. What I am fairly sure of is that a slew of birds simply didn't fall out of the sky due to a "loud noise".