dead birds
On the 25 of February the Mexican newspaper El Sol de Parral (The Sun of Parral) reported the somewhat mysterious sudden death of what appear to be hundreds of Yellow-headed Blackbirds (Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus) in the city of Parrel in Chihuahua, Mexico.

What can be gleaned from extracts of the story via Google translation is that hundreds of dead and dying birds were found on several roads and in a local municipal park. It seems that witnesses claim to have seen the birds falling from the sky. Some were noted to have blood in their beaks while others had been run over by vehicles (presumably already dead or dying).

This latest incident should be seen in the wider context of one in a long series of similar mysterious events going back several years now. The following list is a short compilation from across the planet in just the last 3 months alone: It could be any number of things causing these sudden deaths of flocks of birds, but we tend to think that something occurs in the atmosphere that 'stuns' them en masse. Perhaps a short, sharp shock from the blastwave of an exploding meteor, which occurs higher up in the stratosphere but can send its shockwave down to levels birds fly at, or some kind of electrical discharge (and not necessarily lightning).