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Bird Deaths In Mascoutah, Illinois and Erie, Pennsylvania

October 21, 1999 ­ 

1) Mascoutah, Illinois Red-winged Blackbird Deaths

Last weekend on October 16-17th, a large flock of birds migrating south through the mid-West landed in two fields near Mascoutah, Illinois. That's a small farm community about 30 miles southeast of St. Louis, Missouri. Residents noticed the birds were not moving and the Illinois Department of Natural Resources was notified. Their agents got into the fields to collect birds for analyses. Agents reported that all the birds - mostly male red-winged blackbirds, some grackles and other blackbirds - had their wings outstretched, laying tilted to one side with their beaks sticking straight down into the soil.

Male Red-winged Blackbird Agelaius phoenicus © 1993 Kirtley Perkins.
Male Red-winged Blackbird Agelaius phoenicus © 1993 Kirtley Perkins.

As of October 21, 1999 the official count was 27,000 birds dead over twenty acres and the cause was declared deliberate poisoning of seed grain with the insecticide, Furadan. A reporter and photographer from the Belleville Illinois News Democrat got to the fields before all the birds had been picked up. I talked with Tim Vizer who is the newspaper's Chief Photographer about his assignment to Mascoutah.

 

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High Strangeness Over Florida, September 7, 1999

October 17, 1999  Sarasota, Florida ­ Last month on September 7th, Florida residents between Tampa and Sarasota called police and the media to report unusual aerial lights before and after 5 o'clock in the morning. NASA got a lot of calls, too, and told everyone that the mystery lights were actually a Russian rocket booster falling through the atmosphere and disintegrating over the Gulf of Mexico. NASA said the Russians had launched a communications satellite atop an SL-12 booster on Monday, September 6th, and that the SL-12's disintegration was expected. Major Michael Birmingham at the Space Command Headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colorado told reporters: "The orbital path of the booster took it over the United States. It's not unusual. We, the United States and Russia, warn each other of any launch and of any object that may re-enter so it's not mistaken for a warhead."

 

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Last 1999 Crop Formation in Wiltshire, England

October 14, 1999 Avebury, Wiltshire, England ­

Aerial photograph © 1999 by Ulrich Cox and Peter Sorensen, September 1, 1999, Avebury, Wiltshire, England.
Aerial photograph © 1999 by Ulrich Cox and Peter Sorensen, September 1, 1999, Avebury, Wiltshire, England.


Peter Sorensen, Videographer, writes in an e-mail: "This eight-armed formation that appeared with the mathematical symbol for Pi next to it at Avebury, Wiltshire was discovered on September 1, 1999 ­ the latest date so far on record for an English crop formation to appear."

 

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Kunjin/West Nile Virus ­ First Time in Western Hemisphere

October 12, 1999  New York City, N. Y. ­ Starting back around July 1999, residents in Queens, New York began calling their city's wildlife office to report various types of birds on the ground shaking, wobbling and disoriented. Then crows at the Bronx Zoo and surrounding areas kept dying. Dozens of them. Pathology tests showed mysterious lesions in the brains and hearts.

By August, doctors in New York's Flushing Hospital were seeing an increasing number of people with fever, mental confusion and severe weakness. The combination of symptoms was confusing because usually in cases of encephalitis, which is an inflammation of brain tissue, patients hallucinate, are out of control and sometimes have seizures. These new patients were disoriented, but were so weak they could not move.

 

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Hurricane Floyd Runoff Suffocating North Carolina Estuary

October 10, 1999  New Bern, North Carolina ­ On Friday, October 8th, the non-profit North Carolina Coastal Foundation met in Raleigh to discuss how effective coastal management has been. The impact of Hurricane Floyd dominated the discussion. Dr. Hans Paerl, a marine scientist at the University of North Carolina said, "What we're seeing is an ecological event on the catastrophic scale."

Hurricane Floyd dumped twenty inches of rain on eastern North Carolina on September 16th. The water killed about fifty people as it filled the river basins to overflowing. The flood waters tore through houses, hog lagoons and sewer plants that had been constructed along the Neuse and Tar Rivers. Everything was dumped into Albemarle-Pamlico Sounds, the second largest estuary in the United States.

 

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More Cat Mutilation Reports in Texas, Arizona and Canada

October 10, 1999 ­  

Fort Worth, Texas:

WFAA-TV in Fort Worth, Texas reported on October 7th the discovery of five mutilated cats in Tarrant County, Texas since June. These unusual cat deaths have been found in West Fort Worth near Interstate 30 between Forest Park Boulevard and Cherry Lane. Humane Society investigators say what happened was not an accident, but calculated cruelty by at least one individual. The strange deaths have included a hanging, a cat that had been skinned, and another that had its tail sliced in two halves down its length.

 

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Cattle Mutilation Report from St. Paul, Alberta, Canada

October 5, 1999  St. Paul, Alberta, Canada ­ Fern Belzil, a Canadian investigator of unusual phenomena, e-mailed me the following report and photographs about a June 1999 unusual cattle death and gave permission to post it at earthfiles.com.

Fern Belzil, Mutilation Investigator, St. Paul, Alberta, Canada: "This is a report of a mutilation that took place only ten kilometers from St. Paul and fifteen kilometers from my ranch.

This was a Hereford Simmental cross herd bull reported to me on June 6, 1999. The rancher and his son estimated that the bull had died about 24 hours before they found him. It took some time to find him because (the bull) was mutilated in the bush among willows and poplar trees. They phoned me as soon as they found him and I was on site to investigate within an hour. By then, the bull was starting to swell up, but had not decayed nor was there a foul smell as yet.

 

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Unusual Cat Deaths from London to San Jose, California

October 3, 1999  San Jose, California ­ When I was in England this summer for the total solar eclipse and to study the crop formations in Wiltshire, I learned that over the past year the London Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals has received dozens of reports from residents who have found on their sidewalks or front yards their cats and rabbits disemboweled, cut in half and even decapitated. And usually without blood at the site.

Since at least the 1970s, a similar pattern of cat mutilations has been reported in Vancouver, British Columbia; Falls Church, Virginia; Lee, New York; Los Alamos, New Mexico; Ahwatakee Foothills, Arizona; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; Florida; Tustin, California and now this year since May - in San Jose, California where two dozen cats, a raccoon and a rat have been found disemboweled, cut in half and oddly skinned.

 

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Crop Formations Continue in Canada

September 29, 1999 Acadia Valley, Alberta, Canada ­ A farmer reported that his work crew found a formation in his durum wheat field on September 21st. Researcher Judy Arndt went to the field that day to survey and reported that "the seed was mature, pointing to a date of formation near the date of discovery." The formation consists of a 60-foot-diameter circle connected to two smaller 30-foot-diameter circles.

Diagram: Acadia Valley, Alberta, Canada durum wheat formation survey © 1999 by crop formation researcher, Judy Arndt.
Diagram: Acadia Valley, Alberta, Canada durum wheat formation survey © 1999 by crop formation researcher, Judy Arndt.

 

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Could Ancient Microbes in Polar Ice Cause Epidemics?

September 26, 1999  Syracuse, New York ­ The recent encephalitis outbreak in New York City that has killed three people and made fifteen others very ill has now been traced to a microbe called the West Nile-like virus, a bird virus never seen in the United States or the entire Western Hemisphere before, according to the Center for Disease Control. Until now, it's a virus that was only known in eastern and northern Africa and western Asia. Now CDC officials fear the dangerous virus could spread to Central and South America as birds migrate for the winter season and fly south.

How exactly this African and Asian bird virus got to the United States is not known. It might have come in an illegal import of a bird from the other side of the world. But this encephalitis outbreak and the associated human deaths show that when microbes are released into an environment where they have not been before, the microbes can be especially dangerous because what they infect has no immunity against them.

 

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