Cats ’n’ dogs? No, it’s rainingbirds and fish
Feathered bodies littered the streets and gardens of the town. At around the same time, fish died at Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. As news of the disasters spread, reports began to surface of bird and fish kills elsewhere. Five hundred jackdaws had perished in a village in Sweden, there were victims in Louisiana, while the carcasses of scores of seabirds drifted ashore on the New Zealand coast.
These events, some fundamentalist preachers claimed, were the fulfilment of the Old Testament prophesy of Hosea; “Therefore shall the land mourn and everyone shall perish with the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air; the fishes also shall be taken away”. The Day of Judgement must surely be at hand! But the world didn’t end, so perhaps we should seek an alternative explanation for the strange calamities. Eric Dempsey told RTÉ’s Mooney Show that waxwings had died in Dublin some years ago after ingesting fermented berries, a case of alcoholic poisoning. Had the Arkansas birds eaten something which made them fly around in delirium and fall down dead? Were the American military testing a new Star Wars weapon, a radiation field lethal to birds?
