Is this a return to Aflockalypse? It’s happened before, and this time it happened along a highway in California: Over 100 dead birds were found there. Dead birds have also recently been reported in Missouri.
In the Huffington Post, Travis Walter Donovan writes that the California birds "were intact and had not been shot."
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Crows are mighty smart birds: They share with humans (MOST humans, anyway) the ability to recognize faces and associate them with negative, as well as positive, feelings.
Researchers documented this by having some people feed captured crows while wearing negative masks, while others fed them wearing positive masks. In PhysOrg.com, Sandra Hines environmental scientist John Marzluff as saying, "The regions of the crow brain that work together are not unlike those that work together in mammals, including humans. These regions were suspected to work in birds but not documented until now.
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Here’s something you didn’t learn in school: Ravens are smart birds–they can recognize old friends and enemies (even though they may all look alike to us).
In the April 24th edition of the New York Times, Sindya N. Bhanoo quotes zoologist Markus Bockle as saying, "When it’s a friendly individual, they use a friendly voice. If it’s a bird they don’t like, they try to elongate the vocal track, and the call sounds deeper."
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Here’s a possible cause of the aflockalypse: The company that makes Scotts Miracle-Gro fertilizer for your lawn could also be killing your songbirds.
Scotts pled guilty to charges that they illegally put insecticides into its "Morning Song" and "Country Pride" brands of bird seed. In 2008, Scotts distributed 73 million packages of bird seed coated with the insecticide Storcide II that was intended to keep insects from destroying the seed when it was broadcast onto your lawn or put into a feeder.
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