A Sign of something to come? –Birds fall out the sky in Michigan!

Greetings,

(Another sign that something dreadful is on its way to America!)

Birds fall out the sky in Michigan!

(Keith Matheny) It’s startling to watch robins drop from the air, flop around and die, Jim Vyskocil said.

But the St. Louis resident has seen it multiple times.

“It’s like they are having a convulsion, and then they’re dead,” he said.

A few houses down, Michelle Van Horn said she has picked up at least a dozen dead robins and blackbirds from her backyard in the 18 years she has lived there. The most recent was just a couple of weeks ago, she said.

The cause is no mystery to the nearly 7,500 people who live in this Gratiot County town — a toxic legacy of decades of pollution from the nearby former Velsicol Chemical site on the banks of the Pine River. Velsicol, and Michigan Chemical before it, made a variety of chemicals starting in the 1930s, including the insecticide DDT and polybrominated biphenyl, or PBB, a flame retardant.

A Michigan State University environmental toxicologist’s new study in St. Louis has helped quantify and magnify the concerns arising out of the residents’ dead-bird anecdotes.

Matt Zwiernik and volunteers collected 29 dead birds, including 22 robins, last year from a nine-block residential area near the now demolished plant — only a small portion of the dead birds they could have collected, Zwiernik said. The drive time from East Lansing to St. Louis often meant that by the time they could get to the scene, a cat or other animal had already made off with the bird. And they also couldn’t always get permission to go onto every property where the dead birds were seen.

The birds’ sudden death is from feeding on contaminated worms, grubs and insects, poisoned by the area’s tainted soils.

Forensic study of the bird carcasses showed alarming results: brain and liver abnormalities were found in 12 of the 29 birds. The mean total level of DDT or its breakdown components in the collected robins’ brains was 552 parts per million — some of the greatest concentrations ever recorded in wild birds, Zwiernik said. Thirty parts per million of DDT are known to cause death in many bird species…..more here

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