If you thought the long string of bird deaths terrorizing headlines was over, it seems the truth had other ideas. This week Myrtle Beach California hotel workers reported 40 deceased birds mysteriously falling out of the sky all at once. And if that’s not strange enough, the birds are dropping with no known explanation – just like they did around January.
The fall of birds started just after 2:00 in the morning on Sunday as security guards were on patrol. When he went outside to check on the mysterious sound of something crashing to the ground, he noted somewhere between three and four dozen birds. Unlike many of the previous incidents, this one involved several different breeds. The macabre discovery was certainly an unusual event, but it wasn’t the first time it had happened. And it wasn’t even the first time the phenomenon had been seen at the Ocean Forest Hotel Resort.
And this time it wasn’t just a flock of birds harmlessly plummeting to the ground. Instead, at least one woman found herself the unwitting target of one of the creatures as it made its way down to Earth, hitting her in the shoulder as she visited her son at work. But while the incident wasn’t uncommon, there was one man, Jimmie Livingston, who was on scene to tell the local news station WISTV 10 that the occurrence happened about once every year – and he blames the camouflaged nature of the building for the die-off.
It seems the explanations for these bird die offs has been numerous even if the event was largely the same each time. Though we have seen dozens of die offs, the birds in each case show no sign of disease and show no other injury aside from their eventual death by impact.
Since 2010 we’ve heard dozens of stories of birds falling from the sky and dying off in massive numbers. It’s a phenomenon that even made national headlines on New Year’s Eve starting the year off on a particularly strange note. But this is the first time the culprit has been revealed to be the invisibility of a building to the birds. Of course it seems the resort does have the history to back up their claim. What appears in most respects to be a purely random event has been, at least in this case, seemingly rationalized. But then the story does have one last strange twist to it.
Previous years there were reportedly only a handful of birds that died near the building. Nothing like what recently happened. Could whatever is affecting birds elsewhere in the world somehow compounded what has become a yearly mystery for this one Myrtle Beach resort? And will we see more bird die offs now that the seasons are once again changing? Perhaps we will see in time, but until then this incident – as well as the others – is shrouded in a mystery that makes it utterly unexplainable.