400 Dead Starlings in Utah: unnamed government official says “expect dead starlings to fall to the ground for a few more days.”

An unnamed government official told an AP reporter to “expect dead starlings to fall to the ground for a few more days.”

Source: Dateline Zero

On Saturday, December 17, hundreds of starlings fell from the sky. It was believed the birds were dead before they even hit the ground.

The Standard Examiner reported that a variety of explanations were being given by various officials. “As to why they died, the answer depends on who you ask,” reported The Standard’s Jasen Asay.

JJ Allen, Clearfield’s assistant city manager, said parks department employees have been gathering dead European starlings since Sunday. Birds were first noticed Sunday, but more had been turning up dead since then.

“Our parks department has cleaned up a total of 380 birds,” Allen said late Monday afternoon, “mostly on the north end of the city by Kiwanis Park.”

By Tuesday, December 20, Phil Douglass of the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources said the information he received was that the dead birds were part of a population control effort by the Department of Agriculture.

Douglass said the treatment took place in western Weber County and involved 15,000 European starlings. In other words, he’s saying that he was told that another government agency had killed off the starlings as part of a poisoning campaign.

However, Mike Linnell, federal program director at Animal and Wildlife Damage Prevention Services, said they had nothing to do with the dead birds.

“We have not treated any birds in Clearfield,” Linnell said. Animal and Wildlife Damage Prevention Services falls under the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food. So Linnell would be the one to know.

A post at The Republic is suggesting that it could be that the birds were indeed poisoned as part of a kill-off campaign, but no government agency wants to take responsibility for it. After all, as soon as a government agency takes the blame, an individual at the agency would be asked to step up to allow environmentalists point a shaming finger at him or her.

It could be, too, that a landowner set out poisoned bait in an effort to keep hungry starlings away from food stores. (Starlings are an unprotected species.) However, environmental officials have commented that they did not think local farmers would have poisoned the birds, because there are several other bird species in the area that look like European starlings that are protected by wildlife laws.

The very strange thing is this: Why would so many starlings be dropping from the sky only over the city’s park, dead before they hit the ground, for a few days or more? Seems pretty odd.

What’s even weirder is a comment made by an unspecified official. Utah’s Local News 8 posted an AP story that included this: “Officials say they expect dead starlings to fall to the ground for a few more days.”

Full post at Dateline Zero