Birds Rain Down on Arkansas - The Scientific Story from ASO

Birds Rain Down on Arkansas - The Scientific Story from ASO
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(Added Jan. 7 - Radar photos of possible blackbird clouds from National Weather Service - see end of article for these spectacular images!)

Birds rained down from the sky on New Year's Eve, the last day of 2010 in Beebe, Arkansas
and in nearby Louisiana. Coincidentally, drum fish in the Arkansas River started floating
to the surface about the same time, along a stretch ranging from near Ozark to
Clarksville, Arkansas. Not a particularly jovial and promising way to start out a new
year after the troubles we have seen for the past 12 months.

The second coming? Hideous covert attacks by some foreign (or even "domestic"?) agency to
terrify the American people? An act of God? Global warming? Alien invaders?
Firecrackers?

None of the above. The answer to this less-than-mystery is as old as nature itself and is
minor compared to all the incredibly unusual amount of biological specimens that have
fallen from out skies in recorded history.

Nonetheless, autopsies continue on nearly a hundred of the over 4,000 birds estimated to
have fallen.

Since 1980 when I first published papers via the UPI discussing "things that fall from the
sky", I have spent countless hours documenting downfalls of birds, snakes, frogs, turtles,
gophers and pretty much everything else including a few cows that have rained upon mankind
from the sky in recorded history.

Every one of these accounts has one thing in common: nearby very serious storms, most of
which include rapid upward vortices (known to the local weathermen as "tornadoes".)

The events of the day of New Year's Eve 2010 are no different and in fact, both the
Louisiana and Arkansas bird downfalls were preceded by major tornadic clouds and
incredible low pressure systems to the southwest of the locations in which the birds fell.

The dead fish? Another story entirely....and entirely coincidental with the unfortunate
timing of the demise of tens of thousands of migrating blackbirds who just happened to be
at the wrong place and the right time.....or perhaps the right place at the wrong time:
when a tornado off the ground sucked them high up into the sky.

The fish kill was without a doubt manmade, as a temporary dumping ground of some toxic
pollutant from an area industry was made of the upstream of the Arkansas River, likely
somewhere between Fort Smith and Altus. More on the fishy story later.

**********

Now, how do all these things just happen to get up into the air only later to be dropped -
sometimes hundreds of miles from home - onto unsuspecting residents of a quiet Arkansas
town?

The same way that debris from a decades-gone shoe store in Mena found its way 180 miles
from Mena, during a major tornado outbreak there in 2009......the weather did it.

Blackbirds are migratory animals and during this New Year's Eve 2010, the local regional
climate was such that the poor creatures did not know whether to come or go....it was cold
to the north and warm to the south, but they had just been that route and were returning
northward in great flocks prior to the frigidly cold Canadian air overtook the northern
plains. Residents of both Beebe and Louisiana had noted seeing great numbers of
"confused" blackbirds the day before and the day of the great storms of birds. They were
painting the sky black, and many of them were eventually resting their confused bodies in
large groves of trees nearby.

Meanwhile, the weather was growing increasingly turbulent in Arkansas to the southwest of
the bird roosts and fluttering....storms were growing and weather alerts lighted up the
radar maps like the now-darkened lights of Christmas trees that had just been put on the
curb.

During the early daylight hours before, three people were reported dead and a fourth would ultimately die from a
tornado in northwest Arkansas, all from the same outbreak....weather warnings interrupted
the daily television grind, and storms were growing to tornadic strength in central
Arkansas near the towns of Heber Springs, Greenbrier, Vilonia and areas south and east of
those cities. Fortunately none set down as they had in tiny Cincinnati, Arkansas that
morning and all were spared...except blackbirds.

In 1975, when the Arkansas Sky Observatory was due south of the National Weather Service
in North Little Rock in then rural wooded areas of the city, we watched in horror as a
tornado off the ground arose from a valley in North Little Rock and up the hillside toward
the observatory. The storm had touched ground and caused extensive damage as it left the
city and would later touch down again in Gravel Ridge, northeast of the observatory by
many miles, and cause fatal injuries there.

But at ASO, the tornado was in the clouds, not touching ground. Inside this relatively
clear funnel cloud was all sorts of debris: metal roof panels, boards, birds, a couple of
what appeared to be tires.....and a cow. A cow, with legs and feet gyrating wildly as if
it were trying to swim in the sky. I looked in awe and wondered what forces were in
action to pick up a huge cow and send it aloft over my observatory. Birds, we can
somewhat explain away....but a heavy cow?

The cow had been in a pasture about 3 miles southwest of our buildings and the tornado
merely picked it up and ran with it.....I wonder where the cow was ultimately deposited.

In a pasture, like the tens of thousands of blackbirds in both Arkansas and Louisiana were
roosting in area trees, sensing the advance of a threatening storm. And, much easier than
plucking the cow, the birds were swooped up by the rapid upward flow of the unseen
vortices into the high ranges of our atmosphere, perhaps as high as 75,000 feet. Not much
is going to survive up there, given the combinations of lack of oxygen, the spinning
forces of a tornado and the collisions with other objects spinning along with the birds.
Indeed, at that altitude and even much lower, a tiny bird body will begin freezing quickly
as well.

And....as quickly as all this was sucked up by the enormous forces of the vortex, the
tornado simply "looses steam." Nothing left to hold the birds aloft and they certainly
cannot fly once released; they are either dead or drastically disoriented.....just the way
they were found on the ground.

So all the thousands of birds could have been simply picked up by a storm or storms from what they
had thought would be a safe roosting place to wait out the violent weather, then carried
for many miles to the northeast (Beebe, for instance) until the storm played out.....and
down they fall.

And, yes, there were Doppler Radar "hook echoes" all over the map southwest of Beebe in the early morning hours
prior to the bird drop.

On the tornado Fujita scale, and F2 tornado can uproot large trees and send them
airborne...an F5 storm can result in something as large as a vehicle being lifted and held
aloft for as long as the upward velocity is sustained. It does not take even as strong as
an F2 tornado to lift birds out of trees.

There were reports of fireworks in the area; interesting that no birds are ever reported
kill in mass numbers on July 4. There was even on local resident who called 9-1-1 to
report someone driving around shooting a shotgun in the air, responsible it would seem for
the deaths of over 4,000 birds. Quite a shot.

Although the tornado moves typically across the ground - or in this case, above the
ground - at about 60 miles per hour, the interior upper air velocity can reach as high as
200 miles per hour or higher. An average tornado has a life span of about 15 minutes
before the forces play out, although there are some remarkable exceptions. So, in a 15
minute span, at one mile per minute, the tornado in question would have moved northeast
about 15 miles before depositing the birds as the vortex wind speeds collapsed.

***
FLOAT IN THE FISH

So, what about all the Drum Fish in Franklin County, Arkansas that only days later floated
up and to the banks along the Arkansas River?
A coincidence and in all probability has nothing whatsoever to do with birds falling from
the sky.

The two events together, however, do provide considerable fodder for conspiracy theorist
and environmental alarmists who will find some way to tie the two events together other
than the first week of 2011.

Nonetheless, something quite massive has killed off over 100,000 fish in a 20 mile stretch
of the Arkansas River. Some early test results reveal that at least a large portion of
these fish were poisoned, unlike the blackbirds of Beebe.

Drum fish are predominantly bottom feeder fish and used to a constant and bland diet of
smaller fish and insects and are very prone to a delicate balance of the two; unlike the
all-devouring catfish, the Drum Fish is more easily affected by changes in the
environmental quality of its watery home. Major disruption (i.e., poisoning) of the Drum
Fish will result in a quicker die-off of these species over the more durable catfish.

Since, like the Drum Fish the catfish is a bottom feeder and eats pretty much whatever it
wants, if the Drum Fish are dying off.....so will the catfish over time. It will simply
take a bit longer to realize this since the dead catfish many times have a density greater
than water and therefore do not immediately rise to the top when dead.

So what killed - or is killing - the fish? My guess is toxins being illegally dumped into
the Arkansas River at a point somewhere near Alma; by the time the pollutants reach the
vicinity of Ozark, the upstream fish have succumbed to the poison and begin surfacing
downstream.

Since there are several Federal lawsuits now being heard, and some pending about the
contamination of Northwest Arkansas and Eastern Oklahoma freshwater streams there has been
a concerted effort to minimize the dumping of toxic waste of any type - by-products or
waste - in these streams. One thing about industrial waste: it does not go anywhere
unless humans make it go somewhere and it will begin piling up.

Much of it can be easily flushed down the Arkansas River toilet. Anyone who believes
otherwise is hiding their heads under some blackbird feathers.

*****

No plot, no mysterious Biblical realization, no global warming. Just mother nature doing
what it does best: Chaos in a world that mankind attempts to make orderly. We should
know by now that simply is not going to happen.

Enjoy the rest of 2011!

Doc Clay

CLICK ON THE FOLLOWING PHOTOS FROM THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE; this shows a small, but dense cloud developing over Beebe, Arkansas at 04:26 p.m. CST; the blue cloud of suspected blackbirds at an altitude of about 2,000 feet is just to the upper right of Little Rock. The second image is from 06:16 p.m., showing how the cloud has expanded to great size and is now uniform, circular and blue, indicating a great and even concentration of "non-weather" echo.