by Aisling Ashbery

Created on: January 03, 2011

Estimated numbers of dead birds that mysteriously fell from the Arkansas sky on New Year’s Eve were raised from an initial 1,000 to between 4,000 - 5,000 today, according to a report on msnbc.com.

Revelers planning to celebrate New Year’s Eve in Beebe, Arkansas were met with a grisly and puzzling scene. Instead of stepping out into a pristine street as a metaphor for the new year, they found the town littered with thousands of dead and dying blackbirds. The thousands of birds mysteriously fell from the Arkansas sky on Friday evening.

Reports are comparing the macabre scene to something that would be right at home in the Hitchcock horror film The Birds, and it isn’t hard to see why. The 5,000 birds fell seemingly altogether, and one resident told Todaysthv.com that she couldn’t drive down a road without crushing hundreds of the blackbirds’ bodies.

Another resident attested to the sheer numbers of blackbirds that fly over the town each night. The thousands that littered the streets are a small percentage of local flocks, it seems, as Stephen Brown claimed that millions of the birds fly over the town nightly. “It’s just black” he says, describing the flocks flying overhead.

Of course, the question on everyone’s mind is what caused 5,000 black birds to mysteriously drop out of the Arkansas sky. That’s a question that will hopefully be answered today, as Yahoonews reports that 65 birds gathered from the streets have been sent to the Arkansas Livestock and Poultry Commission lab and the National Wildlife Health Center lab in Madison, Wisconsin for analysis.

In the meantime, experts speculate on what could cause such a mystery of falling birds – a mystery, it seems, that is not so unusual as one might expect.  In a Mother Nature Network video about the event, a California conservation biologist explains that weather can sometimes cause the unexpected death of large numbers of animals at once. The birds may have been struck by lightning, or met a violent hailstorm, for example. It’s even possible that New Year’s fireworks displays were unintentionally the cause of the birds’ demise.

Thankfully, msnbc reports that theories attributing the birds' deaths to poison have been quieted by preliminary autopsies. Welcome news for residents, who were disconcerted to see workers dressed in protective masks and suits collecting the birds. “I’m wondering do we need the same thing” Melissa Weatherly told Today’sthv.

Whatever the cause, it was surely a shocking way for Beebe residents to meet the new year.

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