The Day It Rained Birds!

In a bizarre incident, yellow-headed blackbirds who were on their migratory flight from Canada to Mexico suddenly started dropping dead in midflight.

This happened in the Alvaro Obregon area of Cuauhtemoc, a city in the state of Chihuahua, and was brought to the attention of the police by local residents who observed the birds falling to the ground. Although nothing conclusive has been found as to what caused these deaths, local newspaper El Heraldo de Chihuahua reported that a local vet who examined the bodies of the dead birds believed the cause of death to be the result of toxic fumes. Others suggest these birds may have been electrocuted after roosting on powerlines or may have been the result of a murmuration gone wrong.

The spooky video of the birds dropping from the sky in droves has since gone viral leading one social media user to go so far as to comment that this occurred due to a collision with an invisible alien hovercraft.

In an interview with Newsweek, this is what ornithologist and biology professor at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, Ronald L. Mumme had to say: "Based on the birds' behavior, my suspicion is that a falcon or other bird-eating raptor attacked the flock in flight, and during evasive maneuvers the flock members dove, became disoriented, and many crashed to the ground and injured themselves."

The article goes on to mention that something along similar lines happened in 2020 but this time in Anglesey, Wales when starlings got into a dive murmuration and collided with the ground.

It appears that when one bird goes off course in response to a threat like a falcon or some other predatory bird, the other birds follow suit, and the end result is they crash headfirst into the ground.

According to Andrew King and David Sumpter, "Murmurations exhibit strong spatial coherence and show extremely synchronized maneuvres, which seem to occur spontaneously, or in response to an approaching threat, like hawks or peregrine falcons."

Observing flocking behavior in birds is said to be a wonder of nature indeed.

This is what Mario Pesendorfer postdoctoral research associate at the Institute of Forest Ecology at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna had to say about it in an interview: "I think that the core feeling is a sense of awe. he spatial scale of something that is moving very rapidly — which we are utterly unable to do — and the visual patterning that occurs when a lot of individuals are doing the same thing ... really mesmerizes us."

Although earlier some kind of telepathy was attributed to this flocking behavior, later studies have shown that it is more of rapid transmission of response behavior that results in the synchronicity that can be observed in the flocking behavior.

In 2013, a study conducted by Naomi Leonard a Princeton mechanical and aerospace engineer, and her team in collaboration with physicists in Italy discovered that the birds were able to keep track of each other by keeping tabs on their closest seven neighbors.

Pesendorfer outlines the three parameters with which an individual bird engaged in flocking behavior is focusing:

An attraction zone: "Which means, in this area, you're going to move toward the next guy."

A repulsion zone: "Which means, you don't fly into his lane, otherwise you both fall."

Angular alignment: "So you got to kind of follow his [a bird's neighbor] direction."

Flocking behavior has led scientists to study, learn and develop swarm robotics which can be beneficial when it is applied to different areas such as military, medical, construction, and the environment.

A version of this article appeared on NewsBreak