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Birds 'falling out of the sky' in mass die-off in south-western US
- RocketSyntax 6y agoAren't mass dyings caused by viruses?
- LanguageGamer 6y agoThat's less likely given the wide variety of species.
- briga 6y agoIn this case, the most obvious explanation is the fact that they've been breathing in poisonous air (smoke) for weeks on end. Anecdotally, I've heard very little bird chirping in the past few weeks while the smoke was at its heaviest, whereas normally the birds are active all day.
- pjc50 6y agoI've heard smoke inhalation cited as a possible cause for this, but it looks too early for a definitive explanation.
- hart_russell 6y agoIt would make sense. Most areas in California are covered in a cloud of smoke so thick it looks like fog. Where I live in San Diego it's been that way for the past week.
- abakker 6y agoI moved from SF to Boulder over the last weekend. At the end of my first day driving in Wendover UT, the smoke was still so thick we could look at the sun directly with no eye protection. It was just dull red. In Boulder, there is STILL a haze, though there are local fires that are also adding to it.
- modoc 6y agoWelcome to CO! Boulder is great!
- falcolas 6y agoThe smoke is really bad in the west. https://fire.airnow.gov/ https://fire.airnow.gov/
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y agoLooking at it, and the extent I begin to wonder about the global implications of that. Probably doesn't rise as high as a volcanic eruption or nuclear mushroom, but this is massive.
- seba_dos1 6y agoCombine that with similar massive fires in Australia happening on the opposite season and the fact that this is only going to get worse with time.
- redisman 6y agoIt is basically nuclear "winter" in the PNW. Temperatures dropped by about 20F when the big CA/OR smoke arrived. https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2020/09/smoke-has-caused-temperature-forecasts.html https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2020/09/smoke-has-caused-temp...
- neuronic 6y agoThat's not just gonna affect birds.
- etxm 6y agoWe live in the bowl of Pasadena a few miles (~6) from the Bobcat fire. Current AQI is 343. We have a lot of hummingbirds in our yard usually. We do a lot of planter boxing farming and gardening. For the past three days we’ve seen most of the hummingbirds on the ground in clover instead of in our trees where they normally are. We’ve been wondering if they are flying low to avoid smoke or if they are being impeded by smoke inhalation. :(
- thaumasiotes 6y agoBees are falling out of the sky here -- still alive, but helpless on their backs -- but yeah, I put it down to the smoke.
- throwaway5752 6y agoWhere have you heard that? This field research looking at the problem, with pictures of the dead birds in question, does not indicate that's the problem https://twitter.com/salasphorus/status/1304973085833981952 https://twitter.com/salasphorus/status/1304973085833981952, and that the problem is starvation. It may be starvation driven by fleeing smoke/climate, but that would just be uninformed speculation.
- ghthor 6y agoIt's not likely the particles, it's more likely the temperature changes and the carbon monoxide.
- jibcage 6y agoIt feels like the earth is dying. I wonder if the human population has longer than 20 years of tolerable existence left on this planet.
- chrisco255 6y agoThe planet is fine. What would make you believe that, based on 5 billion years of geological history?
- rhacker 6y agoThere's always a comment like this. How about "The habitability of this planet is dropping like a brick."
- steffan 6y agoHabitability for humans. It's more or less a self-correcting problem
- MiroF 6y agoOur society is so odd. I find it astonishing that so many people can be cavalier about the deaths of millions of people when it comes to environmental destruction in a way that would be totally socially unacceptable if you were talking about targeted killings or genocide.
- paulmd 6y agochina is in the middle of a genocide right now and nobody cares and really, even in cases that don't involve a superpower like china, I think if there was a random genocide in some random developing country, the world wouldn't do anything about it at this moment in time, the west is just too busy with its own internal problems at the moment.
- spaceribs 6y agoOur only outlet to fix this problem in our society hinges on mutual knowledge of the causes reaching unquestionable levels. Until then, it's like watching half our population play out like an "Always Sunny" episode.
- tashoecraft 6y agoWhose traveling back in time out there? Thought the portal was only in Germany
- Izkata 6y agoSeems to be one of those things just weird enough to get used in fiction regularly as shorthand for "something is really wrong" - it was part of the trailers for Jericho [0] and a plot point over the course of FlashForward [1]. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho_(2006_TV_series) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho_(2006_TV_series) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashForward https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashForward
- throwanem 6y agoBirds are significantly more susceptible to acute radiation injury than humans (cf. https://www.nature.com/articles/srep16594 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep16594 - not directly on point, but the dose rate relationships can be trivially compared with those widely documented for humans, e.g. at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_radiation_syndrome#Dose_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_radiation_syndrome#Dose_...). I suspect that's where the association originates, and the use of the trope fits in especially well with Jericho's plot, which opens with a nuclear war.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago“Climate crisis” is starting to become the laziest explanation for why anything unusual happens in this country. Are you telling me these birds never did their migration above forest fires? Tell us why it’s different.
- vmception 6y agoIt isn't necessarily different. Mass die-offs with birds happen periodically, and it is always jarring and always causes some form of investigation or introspection. Sometimes the introspection rules out any human involvement, other times it doesn't. This article is about noting its happening and looking at what's visibly different right now, while the actual investigation goes on.
- danaris 6y agoSometimes, if you find something like this to be unbelievable, you have to step back and ask yourself: What would things look like if the "climate crisis" answer was true? Take the premise that you disagree with, assume that it's true, and try to follow logically from there. In this case, a real climate crisis would have incredibly broad effects. It could very plausibly be pointed to as the cause for the many things people are pointing to as being related to a "climate crisis." So the idea that climate change as at least a significant factor in many unusual happenings in the country (and the world) is a "lazy" explanation doesn't follow logically. Either significant climate change is happening, in which case it is affecting basically everything, or it isn't, in which case it's not "lazy", it's just wrong, but based on a premise that makes it reasonable. (And also, we would need a whole bunch of new explanations for why all these previously-extremely-unusual events were happening, which, honestly, isn't that actually even scarier than the idea that it's climate change? We can see all these crazy things happening; if we don't even have a clue what's causing them, how is that not much scarier than what we already know?)
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoI believe the premise, that doesn't mean the research isn't intellectually lazy and hand-wavy. Believing in climate change doesn't mean I have to turn off my brain when I hear research.
- blahblah4332 6y agoSo far food scarcity looks like the most plausible explanation. Someone needs to get a massive campaign together in flyover zones to get people to scatter food for them. Assuming appropriate feed for these species is even widely available in those areas. Probably too little too late in this case though... I guess we just update the wildfire documents to include care for migratory species and hope there's a next time
- throwaway5752 6y agoI want to point out the issues of 1) commenting on areas where one doesn't have expertise 2) not recognizing that and find credible sources of information. No offense, but even though you projected confidence I doubted you had any ornithology background. Since I didn't either, I recognized my lack of expertise and did some good faith basic research, informally speaking, to see if I could find out what the most likely explanation was. I found a professor at Colorado St. U. with a verified account on twitter (https://twitter.com/Kyle__Horton https://twitter.com/Kyle__Horton) who had retweeted https://twitter.com/salasphorus/status/1304973069056786432 https://twitter.com/salasphorus/status/1304973069056786432. In this case the second tweet was someone with a masters in wildlife biology research with the USFW in this area. It turns out it is food scarcity, but among insectivorous passerines (perching birds). Numerous amateur birdwatching sites that are easy to find note how hard it is to get them to your feeders since they do not eat seeds. Scattering food would probably be ineffective. It also suggests that there is a problem in a lower trophic level. We've read a lot about insect die offs. Now we seem to have a die off in migratory insectivores. Maybe it's because of fires triggering an early migration that is not timed with insect population cycles. Maybe it's not, I don't know. It seems like an area to be greatly concerned about.
- csharptwdec19 6y ago> Scattering food would probably be ineffective. We could still try scatter food. The way this year has been we might as well help Cthulhu along and make bugs fall from the sky ourselves.
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- havelhovel 6y agoI have been told on this forum that the men and women working in wildlife conservation are in it for vanity or for self gratification. Relatedly, I have been told on this forum that there is nothing that regular folks can do about climate change. But then events like this happen, and no one reflects on how fatally pessimistic this community can be. Are we ourselves not capable of forecasting the effect of a burning state on migration patterns? Are we as a society not blessed with enough resources to intervene? If we could all agree to do something—no matter how trivial—to minimize the destruction, instead of doing nothing and attacking the ideas of those who do anything, maybe the aggregate effect would be that events like this are avoided. If you’re in this fight, please let me know how else I can help. I’m going to check on my bird feeders in the meantime.
- jlengrand 6y agoSo much this. The events from the past years have already been difficult to digest. But every time I come and read comments, I'm even more depressed, anxious. "no matter if you don't drive, or stop meat; it won't be enough". "nice that you're stopping commuting, but that won't suffice". "offsetting by planting trees is not good enough compared to net zero". Or worse, dismissive like "it only helps with your own self-guilt". This usually leaves me so depressed. Yes, I realize all those actions won't suffice, even if we all agree to apply them starting tomorrow. And yes, we need both local and global impact for things to move forward. But I also believe that if everyone starts doing their part : buying less, reducing meat, whatever, it will get discussed more and more and become a concrete part of society much faster. Guessing OP and I will get downvoted though, which is fine. HN has a fair share of the brightest minds in Tech and related, sometimes I miss a bunch of less pragmatic positivity.
- aaronbrethorst 6y agoIndividual behavioral change is insufficient. A civilization-level crisis requires government intervention. Vote.
- jlengrand 6y ago
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bryan0 6y agoThe first sentence of this article describes the die-off as "inexplicable", but the sub-title gives a couple explanations including the massive fires and resulting smoke which is covering the western US. Watching the animals outside my house, I wonder how this smoke must be effecting them, but evolution must have led them out of wildfire conditions in the past.
- throwaway5752 6y agoI commented somewhere else here with a link to a researcher posting about findings. The link is to a twitter thread, and several posts down they say, "The birds seem to be in relatively good condition, except that they are extremely emaciated. They have no fat reserves and barely any muscle mass. Almost as if they have been flying until they just couldn’t fly anymore."
- btilly 6y agoAlmost like...their reflex is to fly until they are out of the smoke. Which is adaptive when dealing with small fires, and lethal when they are unable to fly far enough to get out of the smoke.
- sjm-lbm 6y agoWouldn't the fires of the past (ie, the fires that these birds would have evolved to survive) have been larger? I've always assumed that, while fires of the past would have been more rare, they would have bigger if allowed to grow without any resistance. I mean, all our firefighting efforts do some good, right?
- Filligree 6y agoNo, our firefighting efforts mean the fires get far bigger once they do erupt. Forest fires in the past were more frequent, but also smaller.
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- molsson 6y agoDead birds? Clearly, the Earth's magnetic field must be reversing!!11 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0298814/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0298814/
- gdubs 6y agoI was walking the trash bins down our long drive to the road yesterday in a soup of wildfire smoke and fog when it occurred to me — we sure have a compartmentalized way of looking at the issues plaguing the world right now. Part of that is the sheer complexity of our contemporary world. There are few polymaths — most are specialists. It feels like we’re sorely lacking people who see across many fields to synthesize everything that’s happening. But it feels pretty clear that the system is on the fritz, has been for a while, and we’re incredibly stupid to not take bold action to fix it. Instead, we’re still having arguments about whether people are the cause. Of. Course. We. Are.
- mhb 6y agowe’re still having arguments about whether people are the cause. Of. Course. We. Are. You seem to discount the anthropocentric argument (as it should be) and then promptly jump right in to it. Why does it matter what the cause is?
- damon_c 6y agoIf I thought something was God's will, the last thing I'd do is try to stop it!
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- charwalker 6y agoThere is a large chunk of the US voter population that thinks that even if climate change is real it isn't human driven and therefor totally natural or by God's design. So of course nothing should be done about it because either it isn't real or it isn't human caused. This is also the group that often votes single issue or directly against their best interest much like What's the matter with Kansas. Surprisingly, Kansas itself hasn't read that book and seems to repeat history every time the GOP wants less taxes.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago>This is also the group that often votes single issue or directly against their best interest much like What's the matter with Kansas. Surprisingly, Kansas itself hasn't read that book and seems to repeat history every time the GOP wants less taxes. Oh please. Inner city minorities have been voting for gun control (good luck getting the cops to show up let alone promptly in some places) since long before climate change was a thing. The bases of both parties are rife with cognitive dissonance. You could probably count on one hand the number of people in the other country who agree with everything in an official party platform if you present each policy goal in isolation instead of as a platform. Proclaiming that people are voting against their interest is just calling them stupid or saying you know what's good for them better than they do with some obfuscation thrown in to make it fit in better in "polite" conversation.
- indigochill 6y agoOn the topic of seeing across many fields, it's occurred to me there is a common theme across the crises of 2020 (particularly as seen through the lens of the US): "I can't breathe". Covid: check George Floyd's murder which sparked worldwide protests: check Smoke covering half the US: check Not that I'm a polymath or have any answers. My approach to these problems is to leave the fate of the world to those who hold the power and just do my best to locally mitigate the damage.
- paulmd 6y agothe internal instability within western nations has reached the point that our national psyche has regressed to the lower levels of maslow's hierarchy we've regressed from self-actualization and are now focused on issues of survival
- daveslash 6y agoIf our ecology really is collapsing, this is going to get worse. As resources become more and more scarce, powerful first-world countries are not going to want to regress in their standards of living, which I speculate is going to lead to increased global conflict.
- gdubs 6y agoThe US defense department has been saying basically this for over a decade in fact.
- paulmd 6y agoour inability to deal with the climate collapse is only a second-order effect, we are completely unable to deal with anything right now. If it wasn't the climate crisis, and if it wasn't the pandemic, it would be something else. Our political system is far too polarized and far too plagued by anti-intellectualism, it simply can't respond to anything. Russia and conservative media (murdoch media, etc) seeding regressive/anti-intellectual movements has been massively successful, western society is just completely unprepared to deal with freedom of speech being leveraged to spew an unending firehose of bullshit, it's a "copyleft" style trojan approach of using our own democratic values against us. The firehose of bullshit has led to the rise of anti-intellectual movements, an anti-intellectual president, and a party that just votes absolutely lockstep with him no matter what he does. They don't give a shit about absolutely anything, not fires or hurricanes or plagues, and just let all these problems fester. It has a lot of other negative effects too of course, but we have reached the point where we simply can't respond even to acute crises anymore, our system has long-since lost its higher functioning in terms of setting goals and being able to execute them (what you'd call "self-actualization" in maslow's hierachy) and now is struggling even to maintain basic homeostasis (the "physical needs" tier of the maslow hierarchy). (I include Brexit, Bolsanaro, Duarte, etc in this as well - western democracy is in deep fucking shit worldwide and if we don’t get our shit together and deal with the firehose of falsehoods we will be supplanted by more authoritarian forms of government that don’t suffer this vulnerability because they don’t tolerate free speech and dissent.) It is also super depressing to know that even with everything that's gone on, less than 5% of america has even changed its mind. Even with the plague, even with the fires, even with civil unrest and mass arrests, even as the post office is dismantled and we lose the ability even to get a fucking package on time, 40% of america will go in the booth and pull the lever for more of this. It goes beyond just "doesn't affect me, who cares", or "that's 20 years from now me's problem", this has all affected everyone, now, today, and people still want more as long as they get to own the libs. It's maddening.
- oramit 6y agoHow serendipitous. I was just chatting with my partner and we heard birds chirping outside our house. I realized that I had not heard them for a couple weeks now and guessed it had to do with the awful smoke conditions here in Portland. The smoke is still bad but it is noticeably less apocalyptic this morning. I thought birds would flee bad smoke like this but maybe they were just holed up in their nests waiting for things to improve, same as us?
- spfzero 6y agoNoticed the same thing today, birds are back in our yard, here in So Cal.
- aurizon 6y agoFrom the initial posting, it seems these birds avoided the smoke. Miners used to use canaries in coal mines to detect gas. Birds are exquisitely sensitive to combustion fumes. Their instinct is to get far away. It appears they fled to an insect free desert area and kept pushing on until they literally exhausted their fat reserves. The only way I can think to help them is to scatter some meal worms on the ground in the hopes that you will save a few. It will have to done on a wide area = probably not practical. The only long term solution is to change forest management to allow the understory of brush/grass/small trees to burn every 2-3 years via intentional fires. In addition substantial clear zones around all homes in addition to stripes of clear zones every 1/2 mile as fire breaks. These highly packed stand of trees with thick understories burn to the ground, kill all trees and sterilize the soil of seeds so nothing grows for a while until wind scatters in new seeds. California has done this to itself, with the help of The Sierra Club (who lobbied against preventive burns because the home owners loved the trees and bushes where they lived) You reap what you sow. Changes MUST come ASAP
- DeonPenny 6y agoThe sky was red a few days ago. I'm guessing its that. I don't know. I'm not 100% sure, but that was the one thing out of the normal
- HenryBemis 6y agoIs the smoke 'clean', meaning is it just plantation that is being consumed by fire or there is also a large percentage of toxic smoke into the air? Has there been significant number of homes/cars/factories (I am thinking things that upon being burnt would release a chemical/toxic cloud)(thinking the difference of burning 100kg of wood Vs burning 100kg of laptops and how different the smoke would be in damaging health)
- pjc50 6y agoWood smoke itself is surprisingly toxic; all sorts of nasty combustion products.
- bdamm 6y agoTrue, but our definition of toxic has changed. Humans have been living with wood smoke for millennia, it may not be great for you but it isn't very new in terms of evolutionary presence. Smoke from burning industrial chemicals is a newer thing, and certainly some of these industrial toxins can kill or injure you far more quickly than wood smoke. So a warehouse full of laptops burning (and probably painted with lead) is something I'd want to take extra precautions to avoid vs wildfire smoke.
- anonAndOn 6y agoWood smoke is something to be avoided if at all possible. It's actually a leading cause of death in developing countries.[0] [0]https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/safe-efficient-cookstoves-guatemala/ https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/safe-efficient-cooksto...
- HenryBemis 6y ago
- m3kw9 6y agoAnything to do with all the smoke and CO2 constantly streaming up there?
- Havoc 6y agoBunch of elephants were dropping the other day in Namibia too. Nature isn't coping...
- guerrilla 6y agoA source for curious people: https://talkinghumanities.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2020/09/10/why-are-elephants-dying-in-zimbabwe-and-botswana/ https://talkinghumanities.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2020/09/10/why-are...
- rhacker 6y agoIt was the massive surge of cold air that spewed into Colorado last week. The same surge that caused the massive winds in CA / OR / WA to churn up small fires. Those birds left CO for the South - probably don't normally get that in the middle of summer. There's very little smoke in NM. Some but not enough to kill the birds or cause them to fly a billion miles. That was the summer cold snap that did it. This is a classic case of not enough Ornithological Meteorologists or Meteorological Ornithologists. Or maybe because the Ornithological convention and Meteorological convention (which are normally hosted in the same hotel in September) were both cancelled this year due to Covid-19. (this last paragraph was a failed attempt at humor)
- andy_ppp 6y agoI’d need to see evidence of this, there’s a lot of propaganda about climate change causing things “on both sides” so I would like to see a reference to this effect before I believe it!
- ghego1 6y ago> evidence The problem with climate change is precisely this. In order to convince everyone we need evidence. However evidence, strictly and scientifically speaking, can only be produced once a phenomenon is fully observed, understood, and reproducible. In the case of climate change that means waiting for the changes to fully happen, which would be too late if climate change is indeed real. So you are left with a choice: trust the partial data we have and conclude that climate change is happening, or deny it and hope it never materializes. The third option would be to consciously prefer to wait for climate change to fully materialize and only then take action, but this to me sounds a bit suicidal.
- Balgair 6y agoI mean, the sky was orange and the sun never came out. The ice just keeps melting when it shouldn't. The hurricanes are getting worse. The years just get hotter. It's happening, present tense. The data is in, you can see it with your own eyes. It's clear as day (pun intended).
- cryptica 6y ago>> ... climate crisis cited as possible causes for the deaths of thousands of migrating species heading south for the winter Yes it was because of global cooling... The insufficient amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is causing the well documented 'icebox effect' to occur. We need to get our coal power plants running at full steam in order to counteract the cooling.
- aaron695 6y agoI feel like this story gets repeated every few years on HN. Checking one was 10 year ago. I think it's funny people think you can have a collective oral history that's factual. Yet even with computers and internet we get the apocalyptical death cult going on and on about the end of the world and the mysticism. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2079371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2079371 "Dead Bird Panic", I like that comment.
- TomSwirly 6y ago"Everything is fine. This is all normal." https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/science/bird-populations-america-canada.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/science/bird-populations-...
- aaron695 6y ago> "Everything is fine. This is all normal." Thanks. I knew it was a repetitive moral panic. Definitely every few years in western media we get a cycle of hysteria. Over the world I'd say yearly about the "birds falling dead from the sky" as we are all smitten :) You can spell it out, but it's all repeated.
- aaron695 6y agoOh, here's a big list, with links to articles from all over the world. But it does talk about how it might be 5G, which fit's pretty well with the comments here. https://fendaux.com/why-are-dead-birds-falling-from-the-sky/ https://fendaux.com/why-are-dead-birds-falling-from-the-sky/
- skeptronus 6y agoThey have started an iNaturalist project.[1] If you find any dead bird in the affected areas you can submit the pictures of it to the project database. It will help in identification and understanding the scale of impact. [1]: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/southwest-avian-mortality-project https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/southwest-avian-mortali...