Quote:Dozens of birds rained down from the sky over the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester on Thursday morning.

All of the birds ― either 47 or 48, depending on the report ― were grackles, a type of songbird. Thirty-three ultimately died, The Boston Herald reported.

“When I arrived, birds would fly, like from a house to a tree, they would flop in the tree and they would fall to the ground,” Lt. Alan Borgal of the Animal Rescue League of Boston told New England Cable News.

“The weaker ones were just falling right out the sky.”


Local resident Shelora Levaud told CBS Boston that it seemed as if the birds were paralyzed on one side.

“I tried to move them a little bit, and it just seemed like they were on one side, and you put them on their feet and they just fell,” she said.


And the birds weren’t the only victims. Willien Pugh found his beloved cat, Sally B, dying at his doorstep at around 8:30 that morning. NECN reports that a second cat in the area also died suddenly, while a third was “affected.”


Investigators are trying to determine whether the deaths were the result of disease, poison or some other cause.

Quote:Scott Johnston, U.S. Fish and Wildlife’s branch chief for populations of migratory birds, told the Herald mass “die-offs” are not unheard of and said some of the 33 dead grackles collected on Bakersfield Street on Thursday will be sent to the department’s state-of-the-art lab in Ashland, Ore., in the hopes of pinpointing why they died.

“I have seen local deaths like this where starlings or many other birds have gotten into a field that was recently sprayed,” Johnston said, “or you could have a die-off from an infection that moves through a flock very quickly.”

Animal Rescue League of Boston law enforcement director Lt. Alan Borgal said authorities have recovered 48 sick or dead grackles and one dead cat.

Quote:Pesticides don't just kill pests. New research out of the Netherlands provides compelling evidence linking a widely used class of insecticides to population declines across 14 species of birds.


Those insecticides, called neonicotinoids, have been in the news lately due to the way they hurt bees and other pollinators. (Related: "The Plight of the Honeybee.")

This new paper, published online Wednesday in Nature, gets at another angle of the story—the way these chemicals can indirectly affect other creatures in the ecosystem.

Scientists from Radboud University in Nijmegen and the Dutch Centre for Field Ornithology and Birdlife Netherlands (SOVON) compared long-term data sets for both farmland bird populations and chemical concentrations in surface water. They found that in areas where water contained high concentrations of imidacloprid—a common neonicotinoid pesticide—bird populations tended to decline by an average of 3.5 percent annually.

"I think we are the first to show that this insecticide may have wide-scale, significant effects on our environment," said Hans de Kroon, an expert on population dynamics at Radboud University and one of the authors of the paper.

(09-11-2016, 02:46 PM)Mystic Wanderer Wrote: That's very sad.    

I hope they figure out the cause soon.  It seems to me it just about has to be some kind of spray for it to have affected the land animals too.
But, why only a few cats?  Very odd!

(09-11-2016, 04:15 PM)gordi Wrote:

(09-11-2016, 02:46 PM)Mystic Wanderer Wrote: That's very sad.    

I hope they figure out the cause soon.  It seems to me it just about has to be some kind of spray for it to have affected the land animals too.
But, why only a few cats?  Very odd!

Maybe one or two cats caught the struggling birds and ingested whatever caused this?
G