A rash of dead birds and fish found worldwide has caused some to believe that the apocalypse is upon us, but environmental experts claim it’s a natural phenomenon.
“Personally, I definitely do believe we’re in the End of Days, and I believe there is a lot of evidence of that,” Steve Wohlberg, an author and theologian who has written several books about the end of the world, told The New York Daily News.
“On the Earth today, there’s a lot of violence, and a lot of corruption,” Wohlberg said. “Indicators are flashing that there’s a storm ahead of us.”
It started on New Year’s Eve in Arkansas, when 5,000 birds fell from the sky and hundreds of thousands of fish were found dead along the Arkansas River. More dead birds in Louisiana, Canada, Japan, Italy and Sweden while massive fish die-offs were reported in New Zealand, South Carolina and Maryland, where at least two million dead fish were discovered in the Chesapeake Bay.
Despite the apocalypse theories, environmental experts have said that the animals are dying of natural causes.
In Maryland, state environmental officials attributed the fish deaths to ongoing frigid temperatures and an overpopulation of the affected species, juvenile spot fish.
“Spot may have difficulty surviving in colder temperatures, and the species’ susceptibility to winter kills is well-documented,” the Maryland Department of the Environment said in a statement. “A rapid drop in water temperatures apparently caused cold water stress. Surface water temperatures in the bay have reached about 0.5 degrees Celsius according to Md. Department of Natural Resources Bay Program monitoring data, which is the coldest December recording in 25 years of monitoring.”
In Canada and Japan, environmentalists believe a deadly strain of the bird flu is the cause.
Arkansas officials are still trying to determine a definitive cause for that state’s fish kill, but have a theory as to why the birds died: blunt force trauma.
According to a report released by the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, loud noises on New Year’s Eve caused the birds to flush from their roost and fly at unusually low altitudes, causing them to strike objects and die.
Kevin McGowan, an ornithologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology told The Washington Post that occurrences like this have happened before, but have flown under the radar.
“All birds die,” he said. “You rarely see them for several reasons. They’re usually alone. They’re often eaten by the thing that killed them, or they go to some sheltered place to die. You rarely see dead birds until they whack into your window.”