What Kind Of Beast Can Petrify 100 Starlings In Mid Flight?

'The only way to describe what they looked like is that they seemed to have had a fright and were petrified
 
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Swamp Gas.
 
If I may be so bold, speculating on so little information on what caused the birds deaths (Swamp gas- which I took to be in humor, CO[sub]2[/sub], fright/petrification) is as bad as speculating that it was a Passing UFO, an ultra secret government experiment or Alfred Hitchcocks ghost.

What caused their death is unknown at this time and the clues given in one brief news article are entirely too vague, prone to interpretation and lacking in substance to base any serious speculation on.

This occurrence is quite strange and I hope more information comes to light that enables us to deduce a likely cause with much greater certainty than guesswork.
 
Kipec and other area residents said police told them about an e-mail from the U.S. Department of Agriculture that discussed a program to poison blackbirds and starlings, but they were unaware of specific details.

However, Donna Leusner — a spokeswoman for the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services — said Sunday night that the dead birds were part of a USDA program to reduce the European starling population.

Leusner told The Star-Ledger of Newark that her department wasn't part of the culling program, but said it had been told of plans to feed the birds a "controlled substance." She could not say where they were poisoned or what was used to kill them.
http://www.poconorecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090126/NEWS/90126006/-1/rss01
 
According to the beeb, something scared a flock of starlings (like a sparrowhawk for example) and they flew into the ground, killing themselves.

EDIT: the Daily mail is full of shit - it was 75, not 100+ starlings and they weren't "petrified," a witness saw them flying prior to hitting the ground (unless that was css's embellishment, but we all know that he is full of shit as well).
 
Neverfly said:
Why do you pose the question as an assumption that some "Beast" killed the birds?
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Julie, a nurse, said: 'It was like something out of an horror film - like Hitchcock's The Birds - it was absolutely terrifying. Nurse Julie Knight said discovering the birds was like something from a horror film 'The sky was raining starlings. One of my neighbours saw them. They seemed to just fall out of the sky. About 70 were dead straight away. 'The only way to describe what they looked like is that they seemed to have had a fright and were petrified.
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The eye-witness described this as the most likely event. What else scares flocks of birds to their death?
 
Enmos said:
Post 12, anyone?
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That describes possible poisoning in the US. Starlings are a popular species and not a problem in the UK etc as far as I know. Although it does sound like a very likely connection unfortunately and now I guess that they migrate from the states. (Edit, I've googled this answer):
Starling
Many starlings come to the UK for the winter
The starling is a partial migrant, which means that it migrates in some places but not in others. Each year, about half a million pairs breed in the UK.

These birds are residents, and most never leave us. However, this number almost doubles every winter with the arrival of thousands more birds from Eastern Europe. Hard weather there forces them to migrate west in search of food.

In October and November, you can see flocks of migrant starlings arriving along the east coast of England. Most have flown across the North Sea from Belgium or the Netherlands, after travelling across northern Europe.

At Hunstanton in Norfolk, 409,000 starlings were counted passing overhead in autumn 1997, including 87,000 on 16 October alone. Most of these birds continue migrating westwards until they have spread across the whole country. They join our resident starlings to form huge flocks, often roosting in parks, reedbeds or city centres.

In spring the migrant starlings return to Eastern Europe, while our own resident birds set up breeding territories at home. They nest in holes in trees and buildings, where they lay 4–6 eggs. The young spend about 21 days in the nest, and are then fed by their parents for a few more days before leaving to join up in late summer flocks.

You may think from these huge numbers that our starlings have got nothing to worry about. But sadly starlings are declining. The UK breeding population fell by about 50 % between 1972 and 1998. Scientists think that modern farming practices may be to blame.
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So, nothing to do with the USA..
 
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common_sense_seeker said:
That describes possible poisoning in the US. Starlings are a popular species and not a problem in the UK etc as far as I know. Although it does sound like a very likely connection unfortunately and now I guess that they migrate from the states. (Edit, I've googled this answer): So, nothing to do with the USA..
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No, but the events are similar which suggests that they can have a similar cause.
So poison is at this point a very likely explanation.
 
Here's something to ponder and perhaps those amongst you with knowledge on the subject (actual experience in the field suggested).

The Country is currently increasing it's trend in mobile telecommunications usage. For every single person in the country there is likely 1.75 mobile phones. (Yes some people have more than one, some people can have four or five with them at all times)

It's likely that most children have mobile phones, There is mobile phone adapters for laptops and actual notebooks that connect directly with ISP's (Notibly in the education sector).

The number of SMS messages sent is ever increasing, and all this requires bandwidth.

Phones connect to a network, originally coined a "Cell-Net". The reason for this is because when you use your phone, you aren't connecting directly to a person in the same room, you connect to a network of antennas that surround you in a "cell" (a bit like a bee's honeycomb). That cell can deal with most obstructions because of the overall matrix that surrounds you, if something gets in the way of one antenna, the cellnetork automatically corrects itself and your phone to attempt to keep your signal.

To do this correction it requires the cell antenna's to be connected to one another, rather than using expensive fibreoptics cables to connect the towers, a cheaper method is employed. The use of "Microwave dishes".

Microwaves connect cell antenna's together so that large amounts of data can be shifted across the network. When you phone someone up who's using a mobile somewhere else in the country, you are doing so not necessarily through satellites but through the microwave dishes that makeup the cell array. (This dish mounted method allows for easy, cheap access for maintenance purposes, with the "scalability" desired for ongoing business.)

With the advent of 3G and future 4G or greater services, the Microwave usage is going to be increasing and it's likely that anything thats in it's direct stream for a prolonged period of time is going to suffer it's wrath.

Hypothesis 1: The Starlings flew down a microwave stream, or flew through a "Nexus" point where more than one stream collided. (This might occur in the extreme cases where more than one provider is providing a service to the same area through different arrays)

Hypothesis 2: (completely unrelated to Mobile phones). The UK has had a recent cold weather snap, if the birds were finding it hard to find food their overall body mass is going to be low. One decent cold blust could have potentially caused the birds to suffer hypothermia, causing them to fall to their deaths.

In both of these two Hypothesis's there would be "no poison" on autopsy.
 
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