Extra! Extra!: Birds Die of Natural Causes

I'm all for news of things ornithological. The rediscovery of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) is one of the great stories of our time, a tale to brighten the despondency of the most misanthropic deep-ecologist. The success of that expedition ranks with the reappearance of the coelacanth, a fish whose resumé once ended in the Cretaceous period, or the inevitable reality show starring some hack cloned from matter scraped off the last girdle worn by Elvis.

But this story emitted from the "news" wire yesterday, which I admittedly read with fascination, strains the bounds of relevance:

DULUTH, Minn. (AP), September 14, 2005
- A sudden blast of wind is the suspected cause of the death of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of migrating songbirds found floating in Lake Superior.
The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources staff collected about 50 of the birds after receiving a report from anglers about hundreds of them east of Grand Marais.
The tiny birds were found in debris lines, sometimes called bug slicks, where flotsam gathers on the lake's surface, said Dave Ingebrigtson, DNR wildlife manager in Grand Marais.
"We recovered 50 of them. ... But there were other reports, as far away as Tofte, so there were probably a lot more. We'll never really know how many,'' Ingebrigtson said.
He said he suspects the cause was an unusual blast of strong wind that may have overwhelmed the small birds, who were flying during one of the peak migration periods.
"The two ideas that hold the most weight are either that they got blown out over the lake and didn't have the energy to get back to shore against the wind, or that some sort of unusually strong wind actually pushed them down into the water,'' he said.
The National Weather Service reported offshore winds on the North Shore at nearly 40 mph early that morning, while other areas had winds of about 15 mph.
"That would be enough to do it. Sometimes they just can't make it,'' Ingebrigtson said.

This on a day where "insurgents staged more than a dozen suicide bombings that ripped through Baghdad for much of the day Wednesday, killing at least 160 people and wounding 570 in a coordinated assault that left much of the capital paralyzed." Yes, the latter story received wider coverage, but will fade quickly from American papers only to be replaced by news of today's 160 or 24 or 11 hapless human lives destroyed by civil unrest. And those lives too, will fade: no moment of silence before an NFL game, no granite memorial on the mall, no congressional hearings demanding to know what went wrong.

That said, songbirds are in trouble. Habitat loss, Felix domesticus, communication towers, environmental toxins, West Nile virus--all of these perils constitute a formidable modern obstacle course. But migration itself has always been perilous. And there's nothing more natural than a stiff, deadly, offshore breeze.