| OCR Text |
Show A Shower of Dead Birds. A few evenings ago thousands of birds were found dead under the electric light masts and wires. Telegraphic messengers messen-gers and policemen picked up hundreds of them. "Why were so many birds killed last night?" I asked of a naturalist. natural-ist. "The air was light and they were flying low. It was dark and they evidintly got bewildered and were misled by the electric elec-tric lights. They fly at the rate of about thirty miles an hour, and collided with the electric light wires so hard that they were killed, and dead birds were falling in Monumental park and all over the city all night. Of course, the popular prejudice preju-dice of the public to the effect that the birds were killed by electric shock was advanced by many ; indeed, the public seems loth to let go of this erroneous idea, although there is no such thing as getting a shock from the wires, as they are strung. Examine the birds and you will find that most of them have ugly wounds somewhere around the body. There seems to be something about the atmos phere or certain conditions of at least one night in a season that makes the birds fly lower than usual. Last fall we had just such a night and more birds were found about the city than the time that you mentioned a' few evenings ago. While nearly all the dead birds were warblers there were more than twenty species from breeding grounds in perhaps half as many localities." "Do they fly at night?" "Yes, when they are migrating. They seem to travel by night and rest and eat by dav. Some of the strong-winged birds like the pigeon fly night and day at a speed more than twice as great as that attained by the warblers, and they have been shot up north here with rice from southern swamps in their crops. Locomotives Loco-motives kill hundreds of birds during the migrating season that become bewildered and fly against' the headlight," Cleveland Cleve-land Plain-Dealer. |
