What do the birds know that we don't?

If something were truely up, wouldn't ALL birds be 'freaking out' and not just a few specific breeds in particular regions?

Not if the �stimulus� occurs sporadically. If it were universal, the cause might be more apparent.

I am a big into my Fishing (fly fishing) for salmon and wild trout, now this year its been absolutely dreadful. I have seen a lot of environmental changes over here and Scotland JUST in the last two sessions, a lot of floaters in the water and salmon running up the rivers as late as November! Last year, I have thought for sometime that something was up, but just as your all talking about birds, I seen something here about a month ago that I thought was rather strange.

I would walk up and down the rivers here in Ireland a lot, I noticed a decline in good fishing over the past two seasons but I also see something else, when I would be walking up and down the river I would hear either side of me the birds singing and chirping away, as there are nests in and around the tree�s either side of the banks, but I don�t hear it as much anymore and its got to the point that when I on my own its rather lonely without the bird sounds.

On Yellowstone, it�s due an eruption if my understanding is right.

This seems to have happened two seasons in a row....

www.bellmuseum.org...

1,500 Homing Pigeons Get Lost During Race

story.news.yahoo.com.../ap/20040722/ap_on_fe_st/lost_homing_pigeons

Just seen another thread about Pelicans washing up on a beach!

Regards

Boondog

Okay, I did some checking because I noticed some strange activity in the Pac NW as well. It seems that we are not seeing the flocks that we normally see this time of year; from your everyday sparrow, black birds, etc.. Also some place in the East have increased in their population, flocks have dissapeared, flocks have droped from the sky (China), some have just left their nests and everything and dissapeared, etc.

What was strange to me is that usually even through the summer we have a lot of chirping activity early in the morning while the different species feed - which is their favorite time to feed (before dawn). Well, I checked with a friend of mine who is a student at the UW and studies this stuff - or I should say birds and animal behavior stuff like that. I always thought it to be a boring field of study myself, but now I am beginning to wonder.

Anyway, apparently the birds around here are behaving strangely indeed. We have had Herons dissapear and other birds that are normally pesty, all over the place are keeping out of sight; and they are not seeing the normal flock flight formations. At first they were thinking it was the weather because it has been so hot, but they are studying the birds more closely now to try and figure out just what is going on with them. They have not ruled out the hotter than usual, as well as longer than usually nice/hot weather.

He told me to stop panicking and the time to really worry is if they all just dissapear one day or drop dead all over the place. Which incidentally, they have been also probing the possibility of different diseases such as West Nile virus, flu viruses, etc.

That is what I was told.

Folks...We may be in serious trouble!

news.independent.co.uk...

Disaster at sea: global warming hits UK birds
By Michael McCarthy Environment Editor
30 July 2004


Hundreds of thousands of Scottish seabirds have failed to breed this summer in a wildlife catastrophe which is being linked by scientists directly to global warming.

The massive unprecedented collapse of nesting attempts by several seabird species in Orkney and Shetland is likely to prove the first major impact of climate change on Britain.

In what could be a sub-plot from the recent disaster movie, The Day After Tomorrow, a rise in sea temperature is believed to have led to the mysterious disappearance of a key part of the marine food chain - the sandeel, the small fish whose great teeming shoals have hitherto sustained larger fish, marine mammals and seabirds in their millions.

In Orkney and Shetland, the sandeel stocks have been shrinking for several years, and this summer they have disappeared: the result for seabirds has been mass starvation. The figures for breeding failure, for Shetland in particular, almost defy belief.

More than 172,000 breeding pairs of guillemots were recorded in the islands in the last national census, Seabird 2000, whose results were published this year; this summer the birds have produced almost no young, according to Peter Ellis, Shetland area manager for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).

Martin Heubeck of Aberdeen University, who has monitored Shetland seabirds for 30 years, said: "The breeding failure of the guillemots is unprecedented in Europe." More than 6,800 pairs of great skuas were recorded in Shetland in the same census; this year they have produced a handful of chicks - perhaps fewer than 10 - while the arctic skuas (1,120 pairs in the census) have failed to produce any surviving young.

The 24,000 pairs of arctic terns, and the 16,700 pairs of Shetland kittiwakes - small gulls - have "probably suffered complete failure", said Mr Ellis.

In Orkney the picture is very similar, although detailed figures are not yet available. "It looks very bad," said the RSPB's warden on Orkney mainland, Andy Knight. "Very few of the birds have raised any chicks at all."

The counting and monitoring is still going on and the figures are by no means complete: it is likely that puffins, for example, will also have suffered massive breeding failure but because they nest deep in burrows, this is not immediately obvious.

But the astonishing scale of what has taken place is already clear - and the link to climate change is being openly made by scientists. It is believed that the microscopic plankton on which tiny sandeel larvae feed are moving northwards as the sea water warms, leaving the baby fish with nothing to feed on.

This is being seen in the North Sea in particular, where the water temperature has risen by 2C in the past 20 years, and where the whole ecosystem is thought to be undergoing a "regime shift", or a fundamental alteration in the interaction of its component species. "Think of the North Sea as an engine, and plankton as the fuel driving it," said Euan Dunn of the RSPB, one of the world's leading experts on the interaction of fish and seabirds. "The fuel mix has changed so radically in the past 20 years, as a result of climate change, that the whole engine is now spluttering and starting to malfunction. All of the animals in the food web above the plankton, first the sandeels, then the larger fish like cod, and ultimately the seabirds, are starting to be affected."

Research last year clearly showed that the higher the temperature, the less sandeels could maintain their population level, said Dr Dunn. "The young sandeels are simply not surviving."

Although over-fishing of sandeels has caused breeding failures in the past, the present situation could not be blamed on fishing, he said. The Shetland sandeel fishery was catching so few fish that it was closed as a precautionary measure earlier this year. "Climate change is a far more likely explanation."

The spectacular seabird populations of the Northern Isles have a double importance. They are of great value scientifically, holding, for example, the world's biggest populations of great skuas. And they are of enormous value to Orkney and Shetland tourism, being the principal draw for many visitors. The national and international significance of what has happened is only just beginning to dawn on the wider political and scientific community, but some leading figures are already taking it on board.

"This is an incredible event," said Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth. "The catastrophe [of these] seabirds is just a foretaste of what lies ahead.

"It shows that climate change is happening now, [with] devastating consequences here in Britain, and it shows that reducing the pollution causing changes to the earth's climate should now be the global number one political priority."

Originally posted by Woodside
If something were truely up, wouldn't ALL birds be 'freaking out' and not just a few specific breeds in particular regions?

News flash, it is happening all over, now in totally different continents! So does this mean something big is going to happen and soon?



??????????

hey there!

in stuttgart (germany) last year a whole swarm of sparrows (about 1500 birds) flew
directly on a street. that looked very weird. The whole street was covered with birds.
some of them were dead some of them flew right away...

that was really scary..

greets,

l33chy

Originally posted by porschedrifter

Originally posted by Woodside
If something were truely up, wouldn't ALL birds be 'freaking out' and not just a few specific breeds in particular regions?

News flash, it is happening all over, now in totally different continents! So does this mean something big is going to happen and soon???????????

Seems more like something big is happening already. Even if there is no dramatic, immediatly felt changes by us humans, the long term affect clearly could be disasterous if our entire ecosystem is beginning to falter. Today it's sea eels and birds, tomorrow it could be grain and cattle, and we know what follows that...

That's wild. I was watching Discovery Channel today (tis Shark week after all), and they interviewed this one researcher that tagged 13 hmmm not hammerhead, blue diamond?? oh #e I can't remember the type of shark.

Anyhow, on Sept 14th all 13 sharks totally abandoned their natural habitat and took off for 2 weeks. Turns out that that was the day a hurricane hit the coast of Florida (that's where the sharks lived of course). So they somehow new that it was coming because they can sense differences in Barometric pressure.

This thread hasn't been updated for awhile and reports of strange migratory behavior is continuing:

PARIS (AFP) - European birdwatchers are scratching their heads over why a particular species of bird, the booted eagle, is migrating north this winter instead of the balmier south.

According to the Bird Protection League (LPO), nearly 1,000 of the rare eagles have been spotted in southern France over the past two weeks -- more than 30 times the normal number -- after reversing their normal September movement which should see them head to Africa and India.

Link

Yupe its climate change, areas that were drier will be wetter and vice versa. Cold to hot, sunny to overcast etc. Few changes slowly but they begin to add up. The Earth is restructuring itself and some species might not make it.

Maybe the sea will become "dead" but I doubt it. IMO we are witnessing the next evolution of species. Who knows what is coming, but my guess its nothing nice. I expect far more predatory/ cross /predatory species emerging. Such as sharks eating stuff they normally dont eat etc. Microbial life that supports the food chain will continue to exist just maybe a different type that will in turn support a different food chain. Maybe we will see more algea blooms (because of the warmer water) which in turn will consume the extra Carbon Dioxide components and return more "breathable air" to the atmosphere as a sort of natural regulation system. And in return more "fish" types that eat algea will take hold, and in turn they will provide more food for the warmer water predators such as sharks and maybe a new massive shark eating shark will evolve. Human live in a manufactured world, regulated by things they manufacture. Humans will survive however they need to survive. The animal world has to regulate itself based on the enviroment and must evolve as the strongest more adapt species to survive take hold. If this was not true then when the dinosaurs died all life would have died. But life did move on and evolved into the life forms we see today and in the future will evolve into the life forms of the future until Humans decide to blow up the planet with radiation or we are consumed as a planet by the sun.

Even if we do irradiate the planet I am sure life will live on, the cockroaches and the ants or spiders something will live on, and rapidly breed before radiation kils them and over time as the radiation decays, they will multiple and mutate into different species. And where as of today scientists think life evolved from the "sea" maybe eons in the future that life will have evolved from "insects" and some other travellers happening upon earth will really find the stuff of Science Fiction on earth. A planet inhabited by agressive insect like life forms that kill each other and other things that get in their way. Maybe they will not evolve into the type of conscience intelligence and manipulation of the physical world that humans have but I bet they will become just as deadly.

We have created the future, maybe its just for "someone" else to live through.

Think about that.

Pigeons are falling out of the sky in Thailand

www.recombinomics.com...

leading to school closings and general panic. However, there has only been one reported fatal human case in the province (last month). Pandemic potential is MUCH higher than discussed by officials

www.recombinomics.com...

Originally posted by Boon_Dog

Just seen another thread about Pelicans washing up on a beach!

Regards

Boondog

Many times the dead birds die from some sort of poisoning that can be fairly local. In the case of the dead pigeons in Thailand, they clearly died from avian flu

www.recombinomics.com...

which has generated quite a bit of panic. Since avian flu is transmissible, it is easy for the virus to be transmitted to cats who might eat the birds

www.recombinomics.com...

who then transmit the disease to other animals

www.recombinomics.com...

Unfortunately, this cycle can lead to a major pandemic

www.recombinomics.com...

which is why there is panic in Thailand.

What is the ratio for how long the jarrasic piriod vs. how long humans have been around... How many people believe that we have sped up the cycle that much?