Hundreds of birds crashed to their death in Mexico. Experts reveal why

[ad_1]

That’s the view a handful of people woke up to in Chihuahua, Mexico, on February 7.

Millions around the world got a front-row seat of the massacre when security camera footage was released of the event, but it left people with more questions than answers.

“The cause of this bizarre and troubling incident is honestly anybody’s guess at this point,” said Carlos Botero, assistant professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis.

The footage didn’t show the entire swarm of birds, but Botero hypothesized that they could have flown through a cloud of lethal chemicals. Autopsies of the dead bird specimens would need to be completed to determine if that was the case, he said.

A predator could have also sent the birds frantically flying away, Botero added.

Richard Broughton, an ornithologist at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, was almost certain the maneuver was to avoid a predator like a peregrine falcon.

“Blackbirds form tight flocks, called a ‘murmuration,’ that swirls in the sky to try and confuse the falcon so it cannot pick a target,” Broughton said via email.

To combat this strategy, the falcon dives straight into the flock of birds to separate out a target, Broughton explained. When this happens, the blackbirds try to avoid it.

In the video, viewers are likely seeing the birds try and escape a predator that attacked them from above, he said. The birds headed down, but some could not pull up fast enough, Broughton added.

Assuming the time stamp of 7:42 p.m. local time on the video is accurate, the birds were likely leaving their nocturnal roost nearby, said Andrew Farnsworth, senior research associate at The Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York.

In addition to the predatory theory, Farnsworth suggested that a loud noise startling the birds was another possibility. This has happened in the past with other species of birds, he said.