Originally published at: Astonishing video of entire flock of birds mysteriously dropping from the sky | Boing Boing
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Maybe a microburst?
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That does look like a murmuration. And the great majority seem to have rebounded and flown away.
A study I saw 6-8 yrs ago (on BoingBoing I think) found that each bird in a murmurating flock is focused on about seven of its immediate neighbors, and averages what they do to decide which way to turn. I’d guess some guessed wrong.
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“Fuck this flock of birds, in particular.”
– Vengeful Deity
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No downdraft in the bushes,
I guess it’s just like humans in a huge multi car pile up.
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But you’d think there would be a predator that had evolved to provoke exactly this kind of behaviour? Cooperate to smash the flock to the ground and then return to feast on the birds that are still dead or knocked out.
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Evil, that’s my guess.
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Controlled flight into terrain.
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“I thought we were all following YOU!”
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Sure, but at the same time, birds are evolving to avoid that, so who is to say the predators would get the evolutionary upper hand?
Besides, to get the flock to smash into the ground, the predator would likely have to head downward as well, which makes it more likely the predator themselves would pull a Wile E. Coyote and thus Darwin themselves out of the gene pool.
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Are we certain it was controlled flight? That seemed to me to be more like loss of situational awareness following predator-collision avoidance maneuvers. Does anyone know if the flock declared an emergency? I suppose we’ll have to wait for the final report from the Agencia Federal de Aviación Civil to know for sure. /s
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My years of watching Air Disasters on the Smithsonian channel tell me the first thing we need to do is find the Black Box.
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The government report cites “Avian Error” as the principal cause.
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Groovy!
We’ll have to wait until the Black Bird Boxes are recovered before we’ll get a clearer idea of what happened
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What if just above the video’s top crop line there are some multi-phase power lines and the bird flock density (or BFD) was just sufficient to briefly bridge two of the phase lines? …as such, if you will, withal. (“booooring! it’s definitely ley lines”)
That’s a lot of drones to lose control of all at once. Probably a jamming device of some sort.
I’m guessing there’s a pizza parlor with a basement nearby.
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Good example of the wisdom of crowds.
Clearly it was Biden’s reptilian love child with it’s 5G neural interface transmissions controlling the bird (enemy spy drone) flock to crash before it could deliver the secret cure to Fauci’s Chinese Bioweapon (wthat really doesn’t exist, and is really no more than a flu anyway).
Fuck, that was exhausting. Think I hit all of the key points. I don’t know how people do that for real all the time.
And for everyone wondering about bird predator avoidance imperfection… I once saw a pigeon “poof” itself into either a dead or unconscious puff of feathers and meat by hitting a solid wood fence while trying to avoid a hawk. The hawk was only a foot or two behind it, both flying really fast, and the hawk deftly avoided the fence, then banked up and into a tree when it saw that I was watching the whole chase. It didn’t come down to collect the dead pigeon until I was about 30-40 meters away.
I’d bet that there was something (hawk or falcon) above the murmuration that caused it to go groundwards, then likely was out of frame until whoever was filming left the area.
Are there local Reuters contributors that aren’t subject to review and approval? Because the video is titled “flock of birds drops dead” which is clearly not what happened. Seems reckless for Reuters.
