Thursday was a normal afternoon on Radford University’s campus. That’s before this happened: A flock of birds, more than 50 in total, fell out of the sky. “I jumped in the car and drove to campus to try and figure out what was going on,” explained Karen Powers, a biology professor at Radford University.
As luck would have it, she’s sponsoring a project on bird-window crashes. This, however, was no window crash. “It turns out it was just a swarm of birds on the ground. I was walking up to just one single sidewalk, and I probably counted at least a dozen dead birds to my left and my right,” said Powers.
Powers says they found 55 dead birds in just an hour. They did find two birds that while stunned, were alive! At this time, the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources is investigating the cause of death by testing five birds. Sabrina Garvin, the executive director of Southwest Virginia Wildlife Center, said they have many speculations, but one idea is that the birds died from trauma.
“It could be they ingested some type of fermented berry or a toxin and then possibly that made them drunk,” Garvin said. “They fell to the ground. And the fall to the ground caused the injury or the death.” The surviving birds will remain with the wildlife center until test results return.
