The world is swept in a welter of news from all parts of the globe all informing of sudden mass demise of winged creatures and sea-dwellers. Days around the New Year have been marked by countless corpses of various species of birds and fishes, their death as unexpected as it is inexplicable.
While local inhabitants are worried over the out-of-the-blue holocaust, scientists are shrugging. So far there is virtually nothing to account for those casualties in the animal world.
The mystery of the agency dealing this terrible mass deathblow to the world fauna has given rise to a wide range of theories including the changing of the magnetic poles and aliens’ nefarious activities. Conspirologists are raving about newly-hatched governmental plots.
An American news site even started a poll on a probable cause of deaths. Its readers opted for lightning, New Year fireworks, hail, or something they called “stress” as the most likely ones.
In some places like the town of Bebe in Arkansas festive fireworks might have caused the carnage… But none of conspiracy or eschatology experts is satisfied with anything short of the hand of doom suspended over the world.
They may have something in that, for these tragic occurrences cannot have a common cause, having struck simultaneously in places as different and far apart as the south of Sweden in the north and Brazil and New Zealand in the south.
It is strangely evocative of an episode in the TV series ‘FlashForward’ with Joseph Fiennes that depicts a flock of birds pelting down on the Somalia desert.
Hopefully these are not the first signs of the horrible omens for the year 2012, and we can still enjoy global catastrophe movies without fearing anything like that happening in reality.
Source of the image: Newscientist.
