Poorly Covered News - Birds Fall From Sky Every Winter
Posted by bosskitty on January 23, 2008
Photo credits to: Charles Uibel: GreatSaltLakePhotos.com
Scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) National Wildlife Health Center are concerned that avian cholera, which recently killed about 30,000 eared grebes—small, diving water birds—at Great Salt Lake, Utah, could spread as birds migrate south for the winter, the agency announced today.
Britney Spears Soap Opera is more important than tens of thousands of birds dying over the NW USA? Birds dying and spreading contagions throughout the US, since before 2004, seems to be a pretty serious oversight by the MSM.
Over the past 10 to 15 years, avian cholera has recurred almost annually in several areas: southern Saskatchewan, California’s Central Valley and Klamath Basin, the Texas panhandle and rice belt, the Rainwater Basin of Nebraska, and in the Mississippi and Missouri River drainages.
- Birds in Great Salt Lake Felled by Cholera by the Thousands - Some of the birds flew upside down or threw their heads back between their wings. Some fell out of the sky. Others tried to land a foot or more above the water, or swam in circles when they got there. And then they died.
The birds — eared grebes, ruddy ducks, California gulls and northern shovelers, about 15,000 in all — have been discovered over the past month on the shores of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. According to the United States Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center, they died from avian cholera.
· Utah: Cholera Suspected in Bird Deaths - About 1,500 dead birds that washed up on the southern shore of the Great Salt Lake may have been killed by avian cholera, an expert said. Dead grebes, ducks and gulls were being sent to the National Wildlife Health Center of the United States Geological Survey in Madison, Wis., for examination. “If I was a betting man,” said the expert, Tom Aldrich of the State Division of Wildlife Resources, “I would bet it was cholera.” 
The disease, which poisons the blood, spreads when birds are overcrowded and food supplies are short. It does not affect humans.
It does not effect humans … yet.
Posted in Public Health, USGS, avian cholera | 3 Comments »
