Arkansas state suffered two major wildlife anomalies this past weekend.

Arkansas residents’ first indication that all was not well with their fauna friends was the mass exodus from the sky of more than four thousand Red Wing Blackbirds. The birds didn’t just land on the ground – they plummeted from the sky, stone dead, at night.

Very disconcerting.

The second anomaly involved a fish kill some 300 kilometres south west of the Great Bird Death. Fish kills are not uncommon per se – but this one involved at least 100 000 of our glistening friends, all of the same species, in the same river. This particular event is easier to explain – the dead give away is that the fish were all of the same species, and thus it is more than likely that disease particular to the species wiped out the local population of the river.

Right, so back to the birds.

Toxicology on the tiny, feathered corpses is ongoing, and officials are waiting on possible indication of disease, or poison. Oh something else you should know, someone was probably firing a cannon at the birds.

So there you have it. The birds, terrified for the mortal well-being upon hearing a cannon or fireworks, died from a combination of stress, flying into each other – hard enough for them to suffer significant internal trauma.

To reiterate, the fish probably didn’t get a fright, and swim into each other so hard that they lost consciousness and drowned, though we can’t be sure.

So just to recap, the world isn’t going to end (yet), and the dead birds may or may not pose a threat to public health, and those twenty loud booms were probably just some grumpy old guy, and not the United States Army conducting secret weapons testing on animals at all, ’cause they would never dream of doing something as silly as that.

So what to do with all of them dead critters? Can someone say blackbird pie? What? It’s Arkansas. They cook all manner of small, fluffy animals.

I swear.

[Source : Newss24/Boston Globe/KUAR]