"We wake up with announcements asking to not go to the open decks. To not touch the birds, and to feed them. I thought that the poor birds we're alive and I didn't went there. I love animals and I didn't want to see them and couldn't help in anything. I still can't stop to cry and nobody give reasonable explanation" says another crew member.
Hundreds of birds found dead on cruise ship open decks pic.twitter.com/bQFVkP0TL5
โ Crew Center (@CrewCenter) April 25, 2020
All the crew are stressed from the sight and don't know how to the birds have died. They say this is the first time they see something like this happening on a cruise ship. Later the dead birds were removed and the decks were thoroughly cleaned.
There are many reported incidents and some explanations about the mass deaths of the starling birds. The Spanish News Media "The Local" reported of such incident in February this year, when birds were found dead on the tarmac of a highway. The Local says that a similar incident occurred in Wales which produced head-scratching amoungst local officials before the investigation concluded that the birds had died on impact with the road while trying to escape a predator.
Starlings often flock together in their thousands to form what is known as a murmuration, an amazing sight most often visible just before dusk. But if the group is targeted by a bird of prey, it can send the formation into evasive action which may disorientate the birds and cause fatalities.
Comment: The explanation usually tossed out for these kind of events - that the birds may have been attempting to avoid an aerial predator - seems superficially plausible at first. However if this was really the case one might reasonably expect to see numerous examples and witness reports of mass fatalities like the above happening in the natural world every single day.
Clearly this is not the case.
The explanation just doesn' t fly.
Something odd is going on.