Dead birds, lost birds, camera-fishing birds—if you’re looking for weird bird stories, step right up—because we’ve got ‘em!
HE HAS CEASED TO BE!
One morning in January 2011, Sylvain Turmel, who owns a farm outside of Quebec City, Quebec, walked out of his home…to find a bunch of dead pigeons in his yard. “I was stunned,” he told CTV News. In the time it took to pick up the more than 20 dead pigeons, he said, five more fell out of the sky into his yard, and, after flapping around for a while, they were soon dead, too. Turmel called the local wildlife agency, and tests were performed on the birds. Result: They couldn’t figure out why the birds had died. Over the next three weeks, Turmel said, he found more than 80 dead pigeons in his yard. (And nobody still knows why.)
SOMETHING TO CROW ABOUT
In between May and August 2013, more than 30 crows and ravens were dropped off at an animal rehabilitation clinic in Dawson Creek, British Columbia. They were all paralyzed, and had broken bones in either their wings or legs. Veterinarians at first thought the birds had the West Nile virus, but that was ruled out after testing. Just like the pigeons on the farm yard of Sylvain Turmel—what had happened to the birds remains a mystery.
A GAGGLE OF GRACKLES
In yet another bizarre Canadian mass bird death incident, in August 2013, dozens of grackles—large, dark-colored songbirds—plummeted from the sky and landed on the ground in a small section of downtown Winnipeg. Many were dead. Others were alive, and seemed alert, but could not stand or fly. Wildlife officials had to euthanize the living birds. Witnesses said they had seen thousands of the grackles massing in the area in the hours before the incident, perching in trees, and even on top of cars—and said they were acting “dizzy,” before they started “falling like raindrops” out of the sky. One resident told reporters “it was like a Hitchcock movie.” Once again…tests could find no cause for the bizarre bird behavior.
In early April 2013, birdwatchers from all over Canada flocked to blustery Lawrencetown Beach on the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia. Why? Because someone had spotted a crested caracara hanging out there. What’s a crested caracara? The national bird of Mexico. The majestic-looking bird of prey, with a distinctive red face, an impressive, bald eagle-like curved beak—and a wingspan of more than four feet—is normally found only in southern Mexico and Central and South America. And it’s not migratory. Local ornithologists could not explain why the bird was in the very un-tropical Nova Scotia—more than 2,500 miles north of its tropical native territory—nor why it seemed perfectly comfortable there. (The temperature was rhovering around freezing at the time.) The bird was seen in the area for several days before it finally disappeared. It remains the only time a crested caracara has ever been seen in Nova Scotia.
SHUTTERBIRD
Karen Gwillim was driving through the village of Craven, Saskatchewan, in September, 2012, when she came across a large black bird in the road. It was a cormorant, a type of diving bird. Gwillim pulled over, and noticed the bird “had something silver on its back,” she told reporters later. As she got closer still, she saw the silver thing was a digital camera—the bird had somehow become entangled in the camera’s strap. The weary bird let Gwillim approach it, but she was able to untangle the strap from its neck—and the bird flew off. Gwillim took the waterlogged camera home, and was surprised to find that the flash card still worked: there were hundreds of photos on it—mostly of guys on a boat holding fish they had caught. Gwillim contacted local news organizations, and—long bird/fish story short—two months later the owner of the camera had his camera back. He had dropped it while fishing in nearby Shell Lake…eight months earlier. The cormorant had apparently become entangled in the camera’s strap while fishing at the floor of the lake, and had somehow made it to the road…to give to a friendly human. “I think it’s interesting,” Gwillim said as an afterthought, “that a fisherman’s camera was retrieved by a fisher bird.”
Put a penny on the railroad tracks to have it flattened by a train and you may be fined $250.