Passersby watched one afternoon in Triboltingen in late February, as around 120 starlings fell like stones from the sky. “A third was still moving the wings, the rest of the birds were dead,” an eyewitness tells the “Thurgauer Zeitung”.
Drivers are said to have immediately set up breakdown triangles and called the police. These in turn alerted the cantonal hunting and fishing administration in Frauenfeld. An employee of head of department Roman Kistler moved out.
He had a macabre picture there. All but three of the birds had already died. «The survivors had to be killed. A rescue would no longer make sense in its condition, »Kistler told 20 minutes. He would rarely have heard of such cases. He has never seen one. It is therefore very difficult to determine the cause of the birds’ crash. Some of the birds were handed over to the Center for Fish and Wildlife Medicine at the University of Bern. They found that the starlings had suffered bleeding from the lungs as well as trauma.
Birds flown into an obstacle?
Kistler’s guess is that the swarm had previously flown into some obstacle. He rules out that the birds continued to fly for a long time afterwards. “It could have been a truck, for example.” For the Thurgau office, the case is closed with the Bern results.
The speculation that the birds have crashed due to strong gusts of wind is unlikely to Livio Rey, employee of the bird observatory in Sempach. A plausible explanation for him would be that the starlings thundered into a building or a glass pane. However, since there are no large buildings with dangerous panes near the site of discovery, this is not a really satisfactory assumption either. He therefore tends to the theory that the animals collided with a truck. “For example, if a bird of prey flies into the flock, it may be that they no longer look where they are flying in the excitement,” says the expert. And so they could have flown in the trucks.
Although the exact cause of death remains unclear, Rey is not concerned by the incident. Of course it was a shame about the dead starlings. The population is not threatened by this.
Similar incident at Barcelona
In Spain, too, the authorities were faced with a similar riddle a few weeks ago: 100 starlings were dead on the motorway near Barcelona. The cause of death is still unclear, reports the online portal day 24. A motorist who watched the incident speculated that a nearby chemical factory had recently killed three people. He believes that the animals have been killed by the pollutants that may still be present. The Catalan authorities are investigating the incident.
Dozens of starlings and dead pigeons appear in Tarragona and Badalona in Barcelona Spain.
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