Frankly, this story reeks, to me, of the sort of "unexplained phenomenon" that later turns out—with much less fanfare—to have an extremely mundane explanation. It's making headlines now, but I would be surprised if this is important to anyone within a few months (except a few conspiracy theorists, and the publishers of books about ostensibly unexplained phenomena).
It sounds cooler and neater and more mysterious than it probably, actually is,” said Gary Graves, a Smithsonian curator of birds, “and that’s from a professional viewpoint.” Graves has worked at the Smithsonian for 25 years, where he researches all things pertaining to birds.
When Graves first heard about the blackbird deaths, he didn’t think much of it. He still doesn’t. “The blackbirds are considered a nuisance, especially in the south where large winter roosts occur,” said Graves, who grew up in Little Rock. Blackbirds are protected under the Federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act. But, in large numbers, they can be noisy, messy and destructive. When this occurs, roosts may be disrupted passively—using loud noises to scare the birds away—or directly. Depredation permits can be issued, allowing for a certain number of birds to be killed. But “semi-unexplained” bird kills, even in the thousands, are not infrequent in the world of ornithology. “There are hundreds of thousands to millions of birds in one roost,” said Graves, “So, percentage wise, a few thousand out of a few million is not much.”
The unusual thing, according to Graves, is not that thousands of blackbirds died, but rather where they were found. “If it had happened in some crop land outside of town and not in people’s yards, nobody would have noticed it in the first place,” he said.
But people did notice. And as the official investigation continues, so does the speculation. “People’s imaginations are running wild,” Graves said. Theories range from “the really sublimely ridiculous,” like flying saucers and top-secret government weapons, to slightly more feasible explanations, like: weather, fireworks, or “fracking, a strange thing where they pump high pressure air into the ground to crack rocks to release gas from natural gas formation.” But no one knows conclusively what happened.
I'll bet that term catches on .
