Arkansas Earthquakes, Bird Deaths and Fish Kill

Weather Radar Shows Something Unusual Around the Time the Birds Fell

January 7, 2011

TodaysTHV.com - A weather radar screen doesn't just show the weather, apparently. The National Weather Service in North Little Rock examined a speck on the radar that showed up around the same time all the birds fell out of the sky from alleged trauma on New Year's Eve.

More Possible Explanations for Mass Bird Deaths, Birds Falling from Sky

January 4, 2011

Planetsave.com - Thankfully, our recent story on 3,000-5,000 blackbirds falling from the sky and dying in Arkansas on New Year’s Eve has gotten quite a few comments and brought up some additional potential explanations. In addition to these, I’ve gone searching for more potential answers and have found a few worth sharing.

But before getting into these, an important thing to note is that about 500 birds suddenly died in Louisiana yesterday as well. Supposedly, they flew into a power line… but why they would have done so is still a mystery. And 500 birds flying into a power line seems a little unlikely to me, but I have read that there are a ton of birds in this area and it is, perhaps, really the cause of death.

Possible Explanations for Mass Bird Deaths

Starting from what I think are the most plausible explanations (but remember, I’m really no expert on this), here we go:

1. Geologic shifts and a resulting electrostatic discharge:
   “Birds are very sensitive to electrostatic charges. A simple thunder cloud will irritate a bird severely. This is why birds fly low to the ground just before a storm, to avoid the very uncomfortable charges in the air.
   
   
   In Arkansas there is one of the Worlds Largest Quartz deposits underground. Quartz is piezoelectric which means a charge develops over the surface of the quartz when pressure is applied to the crystal. The charge is millions of volts but it happens so fast its nearly harmless to people on a small scale. This is how some lighters work. A hammer hits a quartz device releasing a spark.
   
   
   Anyways, the recent earthquake has placed new pressures on the quartz deposits in Arkansas. This results in a massive discharge of billions of volts of electricity. Think how a small piece of quartz the size of a pea can light a lighter. Now think about millions of Tons of quartz discharging under the extreme pressures the Earth can push.
   
   
   At some point, the charges below created a brief surface charge, positive charge, during a discharge event. The electrostatic charge is immense and knocks the birds out cold in flight. The birds are still alive though, just knocked unconscious. The birds that were flying high were the ones killed upon impact. Blunt force trauma. The birds that were in the trees survived. Some birds like to fly high, others fly low. This explains why it was species specific as the birds that flew high were the ones to die.” (Note: the writer also predicts this is the sign of a massive New Madrid Fault earthquake coming soon.)

Other than explaining the mass bird deaths, fish are very sensitive to the Earth’s magnetic field and this could perhaps explain the massive fish die-off not too far away from Beebe, Arkansas.

2. Leaking gas / result of gas exploration. The following are two comments from my first article on this topic that caught my attention. These (or some portion of these) seem very plausible:
   
   
   “There was a film featuring birds falling from the sky and fish floating on the water. It’s something to do with the leaking of a certain gas. There may have been a shift change in either land mass or the core of the earth. This will release deadly gasses….”
   
   and
   
   “There is a new gas pipeline stretching across that part of the state from Beebe to NW Arkansas. There was a drum fish die off in NW arkansas near the line.
   
   
   I have heard there has been a lot of exploratory mining for natural gas all along that area. There have been numerous small earthquakes in nearby Guy Arkansas [see next story].
   
   
   
   Loud noises were heard prior to the dead bird fall
   
   
   The birds show evidence of physical trauma (they smacked into something)
   
   
   My guess: A pocket of methane gas blew from the gas mining area. The birds passed out. Trauma was induced when they smacked into the ground or a building.
   
   
   The drum fish kill could also be a gas related thing.


3. Naughty troublemakers or bird-haters shooting fireworks into bird roosts. Regarding the mass bird death in Louisiana, Dan Cristol, a biology professor and co-founder of the Institute for Integrative Bird Behavior Studies at the College of William & Mary, notes: “They don’t hit a power line for no reason.” He is skeptical of the fireworks theory, though, unless “somebody blew something into the roost, literally blowing the birds into the sky.” Well, knowing humans, that seems entirely likely, especially since I read in one of the many articles I recently browsed that many in this region are not fans of the birds since there are so many of them out there currently.


4. Another interesting possibility from the link above is that one doomed bird (perhaps hit by some fireworks) plunged to the ground and others followed it. Maybe not the most likely idea, but given that these birds apparently have quite bad eyesight, especially at night, it’s a possibility. And, similarly, such an occurrence could happen in different situations or slightly different ways, like in the Louisiana case in which the hundreds of birds might have just flown into a power line.


5. Government Testing. With a good review of chemical and biological warfare testing by the U.S. government in a variety of circumstances, Paul Joseph Watson and Alex Jones hypothesize that these bird and fish deaths could be the result of some sort of government testing. I don’t think this is likely given the timing (Arkansas bird death on New Year’s Eve and Louisiana bird death a few days later), but couldn’t rule it out.


6. Bird Flu or Other Disease. After months of examination, it was found that several thousand birds (grackles) suddenly died in northern Louisiana due to “an E. coli infection of the air sacs in their skulls.” Recent discovery of numerous dead migratory birds in Japan is bringing up concern of H5NI avian influenza. Could the deaths in Louisiana and Arkansas be related to some infection or flu? (This seems unlikely given the speed at which so many birds died… but it is another possibility.)

More ideas?

Or more evidence to support one of the ideas above?

Please share.

Beebe, Arkansas, the town were 5,000 red-winged black birds fell from the sky around 11 p.m., Friday, December 31, is not that far from Pine Bluff, perhaps 60 miles give or take. The spot along the Arkansas River where the 100,000 drum fish were found dead on Thursday, December 30, was near Ozark, Arkansas. The community of 549 residents, Guy, Arkansas, which has experienced an almost constant shaking from 487 earthquakes since September 20, is north of Little Rock. The Arkansas River runs along Little Rock and Pine Bluff. There is an U.S. Air Force base in Little Rock.

Earthquake 'Swarm' Rattles Arkansas Town and Its Residents

December 13, 2010

CNN - The Arkansas Geological Survey is trying to unravel a mystery: What is causing earthquakes in the town of Guy, Arkansas?

Since September 20, the community of 549 residents north of Little Rock has experienced an almost constant shaking from 487 measurable earthquakes.

"We've had 15 today including a 3.1 (magnitude) from this morning," Scott Ausbrooks, geohazards supervisor for the Geological Survey, said Monday. "These are shallow quakes between two and eight kilometers (between one-and-a-quarter and five miles) below the surface."

While earthquakes aren't unusual in the Southeast state, the frequency is.

"This time last year we had 39 quakes total for the entire state," said Ausbrooks.

Most of the quakes in the swarm -- a localized surge of earthquakes with all of them about the same magnitude, according to the United States Geological Survey -- are so small they go unnoticed. The largest, a 4.0 on October 11, caused the only documented damage, cracking a window at a visitor's center to a state park.

Guy Mayor Sam Higdon said when the swarm first happened, citizens took notice.

"They were calling City Hall asking, "What are you going to do?'" he said.

In response to the constant bombardment of tiny quakes, Higdon's office has organized a three-hour long town meeting, and sought the help of state geologists and members of the oil and gas industry to find answers.

"My wife wants to buy earthquake insurance. I'm trying to talk her out of it," the mayor said Monday.

There are several geologic faults in the area, but none associated with the New Madrid fault, the large seismic fault in the region and one that was the source of an estimated 7.0-magnitude earthquake in 1811. And there was another historic flurry of earthquakes in 1982, 15 miles south of Guy. Geologists know it as the Enola Swarm, responsible for 15,000 quakes within a year's time, followed by more shaking in 2001.

At first, town officials assumed the current wave of shakes came from work at a gravel company on the outskirts of town.



Ausbrooks says the state Geological Survey has no idea whether the current swarm is a natural or man-made event, but his office is seriously exploring the latter.

"We see no relation to the drilling in the area, but we haven't ruled out a connection to the salt water disposal wells," he said.

According to the Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission, there are at least a half dozen "disposal wells" within a 500-square-mile zone around Guy. Licensed by the state of Arkansas, disposal wells are a byproduct of the oil and gas industry and are used to inject drilling waste water back into the earth after drilling.

Ausbrooks said drillers inject waste water into the earth at high pressure, and in the area around the town the disposal wells go as deep as 12,000 feet. He points to incidents in Colorado in the 1960s at Rocky Mountain Arsenal, where deep water injection was tied to earthquakes.

Last week the state of Arkansas issued a moratorium on new drilling permits. Lawrence Bengal, director of the Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission, said previously his office required only monthly reports outlining the operations of injection wells.

"We're asking well operators to provide daily reports now," Benegal said.

Ausbrooks said his office is pouring over the data trying to determine whether there is a correlation between the disposal wells and the shaking, and he hopes to present preliminary findings to the state next month.

Mass Bird, Fish Deaths Occur Regularly

January 6, 2011

AFP - What’s causing the deaths of millions of birds and fish around the world?

It turns out, perhaps nothing. Digging down to the bare facts, it looks like recent wildlife deaths are not that out of the ordinary. As Glenn explained during his Fox News broadcast Thursday evening, it’s not even that hard to verify the facts:

The AP also notes that while various blog and media sights connected the dots in the latest “aflockalypse” — from sinister government plots to biblical prophesies — biologists say these mass die-offs happen all the time:

Federal records show they happen on average every other day somewhere in North America. Usually, we don‘t notice them and don’t try to link them to each other.

“They generally fly under the radar,” said ornithologist John Wiens, chief scientist at the California research institution PRBO Conservation Science.

Since the 1970s, the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center in Wisconsin has tracked mass deaths among birds, fish and other critters, said wildlife disease specialist LeAnn White. At times the sky and the streams just turn deadly. Sometimes it’s disease, sometimes pollution. Other times it’s just a mystery.

In the past eight months, the USGS has logged 95 mass wildlife die-offs in North America and that’s probably a dramatic undercount, White said. The list includes 900 some turkey vultures that seemed to drown and starve in the Florida Keys, 4,300 ducks killed by parasites in Minnesota, 1,500 salamanders done in by a virus in Idaho, 2,000 bats that died of rabies in Texas, and the still mysterious death of 2,750 sea birds in California.

On average, 163 such events are reported to the federal government each year, according to USGS records. And there have been much larger die-offs than the 3,000 blackbirds in Arkansas. Twice in the summer of 1996, more than 100,000 ducks died of botulism in Canada.

“Depending on the species, these things don’t even get reported,” White said.

Weather — cold and wet weather like in Arkansas New Year’s Eve when the birds fell out of the sky — is often associated with mass bird deaths, ornithologists say. Pollution, parasites and disease also cause mass deaths. Some are even blaming fireworks for the blackbird deaths.

So what’s happening this time?

Blame technology, says famed Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson. With the Internet, cell phones and worldwide communications, people are noticing events, connecting the dots more.

“This instant and global communication, it’s just a human instinct to read mystery and portents of dangers and wondrous things in events that are unusual,” Wilson told The Associated Press on Thursday. “Not to worry, these are not portents that the world is about to come to an end.”

Wilson and the others say instant communications — especially when people can whip out smart phones to take pictures of critter carcasses and then post them on the Internet — is giving a skewed view of what is happening in the environment.

The irony is that mass die-offs — usually of animals with large populations — are getting the attention while a larger but slower mass extinction of thousands of species because of human activity is ignored, Wilson said.

Mass Bird and Fish Deaths Stoke Curiosity

January 6, 2011

AFP - Five thousand dead blackbirds rained from the sky on the first day of the New Year in Arkansas. Then more dead birds fell in other states. Then huge fish kills were discovered in multiple US waterways.

And suddenly it became a worldwide phenomenon, with reports of mass die-offs of birds and fish in Sweden, Britain, Japan, Thailand, Brazil and beyond. Doves, jellyfish, snapper, jackdaws... it seemed no species was immune.

Conspiracy theorists, doomsdayers and religious extremists warned that the end was nigh. Could it be astronauts testing a potent sound beam to ward off aliens? The US military experimenting with satellite-powered energy weapons? What about chemical sprays, meteor showers, or earthquakes activating pollutants from the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico?

"Birds" surged to the most searched term on The New York Times website.

Religious bloggers loaded their sites with Bible verse, Hosea 4:1-3:

"The land dries up, and all who live in it waste away; the beasts of the field, the birds in the sky and the fish in the sea are swept away."

But as speculation roiled the blogosphere, wildlife experts rolled their eyes.

"It is not that unusual," said Kristen Schuler, a scientist at the US Geological Survey's National Wildlife Health Center.

"There is nothing apocalyptic or anything that is necessarily out of the ordinary for what we would see in any given week."

Indeed, the USGS keeps a log on its website with reports of groups of birds dying each week, averaging from dozens to thousands.

Regarding the bird deaths in Arkansas, where the local custom is to set off fireworks to mark New Year's Eve, officials determined it was likely that the noise set off a deadly bird panic.

"It appears unusually loud noises, reported shortly before the birds began to fall, caused the birds to flush from a roost," the USGS National Wildlife Health Center said in a statement posted on the Arkansas Fish and Game Commission website.

"Additional fireworks in the area may have forced the birds to fly at a lower altitude than normal and hit houses, vehicles, trees and other objects. Blackbirds have poor night vision and typically do not fly at night."

In Louisiana, Schuler said it looked like cold weather might have killed off about 500 birds. Meanwhile in Maryland, locals were spooked by reports of some two million dead fish in the Chesapeake Bay.

But officials were quick to assuage those concerns, saying the deaths were a result of an unusual cold snap, combined with an overpopulation of a species known as spot fish.

"Natural causes appear to be the reason for the deaths of the fish," said a statement by the Maryland Department of the Environment.

"Spot may have difficulty surviving in colder temperatures, and the species? susceptibility to winter kills is well-documented," it said, noting that surface water temperatures last month were the coldest in 25 years.

As for the bird and fish deaths elsewhere in the world, many were still under investigation.

According to the National Wildlife Federation's Doug Inkley, the most frequent cause of mass death in birds is disease, though pollution and "just plain accidents" can also trigger large scale die-offs. Often, people just are not aware of them.

"Most of the time these areas are not near human habitation such as in forests or in the woods," he said on CNN.

But in today's Internet Age, when hardly anything remains secret, word of mass bird deaths has spread with unparalleled speed.

"In 1960 if a bunch of birds started falling from the sky it may have been noticed by some people. It may have gotten reported in the local paper, but it may never have gotten any further than that," said Robert Thompson, professor of pop culture at Syracuse University.

"Now some of these kinds of stories, because they get out there on the Internet, if they are compelling enough they can immediately make this jump to national news," he said.

"Let's face it, big quantities of birds falling from the sky or fish going belly up is a pretty compelling story."

See: The 10 Leading Theories for Dead Birds and Fish
See: Mass Animal Deaths on Google Maps