Science Update- Unexplained mass wildlife deaths

Red-winged Black bird,image by Alan D. Wilson of naturespicsonline.com. (This image has a creative commons 2.5 licence- for details, click [here])

Welcome to Weirdbeautiful!

Today's links are definitely weird, rather than beautiful.

In recent days there have been 3 separate incidents of mass wildlife deaths that are as yet not fully explained.

The first was [this story] about the mysterious death of more than 1000 Red-winged blackbirds(Agelaius phoeniceus) on New Year's Eve in Beebe, Arkansas. The birds apparently fell, dead, from the sky over the small town in White County.

You can find more details online here-
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110102/ap_on_fe_st/us_odd_dead_birds_arkansas

and here-

http://www.examiner.com/political-spin-in-national/dead-birds-beebe-arkansas-break-record-for-single-kill

The second was a similar, also unexplained, instance of around 500 birds- mostly blackbirds and other small to medium sized birds- falling from the sky in Louisiana, around 30 miles from Baton Rouge and around 300 miles from Beebe, Arkinsas.
The full story is online here-
http://abcnews.go.com/US/bird-deaths-louisiana-911-calls-released-arkansas-blackbird/story?id=12544093

The third was the finding of two million (mostly juvenile) dead fish off the coast of Maryland. The most likely explanation for this event is currently considered to be that the fish were killed by "heat shock" caused by the rapid and large temperature changes over the past few weeks. For more details, see-
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/5/20110105/twl-two-million-fish-found-dead-in-maryl-3fd0ae9.html

Science Update- Swordfish and Trees

Just two links in science update this week-

The International Herald Tribune published this article- http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/science/earth/02trees.html?ref=science by Leslie Kaufman paraphrasing a recent survey of part of a forest in the Eastern USA (specifically Maryland). The article states that it appears that the trees studied are responding to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide by growing faster. This in effect means that they have been soaking up some of the excess carbon dioxide and counteracting global warming, to some extent at least; whether this trend will continue is less clear cut. The scientific study- by Geoffrey C Parker and colleagues was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The second, is this stranger story about swordfish damaging an oil loading pipe line in Angola-

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/22/20100202/tod-oukoe-uk-angola-crude-6d5fb3c.html