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.
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." 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.
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