Just days after thousands of dead birds fell from the sky in Arkansas more dead birds have turned up in Baton Rogue, Louisiana.
This time the dead birds number in the hundreds and their dead corpses were scattered along a highway in Pointe Coupee Parish on Monday. The dead birds in Louisiana come just three days after the dead birds in Bebe, Arkansas rained from the sky.
Also related, more than 100,000 dead drum fish were found along a 20-mile stretch of the Arkansas River last week.
The birds in both Louisiana and Arkansas are blackbirds and starlings that died from internal injuries that, in turn, formed blood clots. But no one seems to know why. The dead birds are currently being tested. Test results are expected in a matter of weeks.
Louisiana State Wildlife Veterinarian Jim LaCour says that dead birds in large numbers isn’t actually all that rare and has happened in the state of Louisiana before. “Underlying disease, starvation and cold fronts where birds can’t get their body heat up,” have caused birds to die “in various species over the years.”
On Monday USGS spokesman Paul Slota said he had not yet heard of Louisiana’s dead bird problem, but said that in the past 30-years there have been 16 similar instances of dead birds, all blackbirds, like the ones in Louisiana and Arkansas, where a thousand or more birds have died at once. “These large events do take place. It’s not terribly unusual.”
This is just so eerie, and so sad! :( Poor birds :(