There are a lot of ways to welcome in the New Year. The big party in Times Square is the one that gets all the coverage, but other communities have their traditions that are equally important and, frankly, seem more interesting than hanging around with a million drunk New Yorkers. For example, in Brasstown, North Carolina, the big celebration was at Clay’s Corner gas station and convenience store. The dawn of the new year was marked by dropping a possum from a tower. The possum was in a plexiglass cage and arrived on the ground unharmed by the experience. I’m sure they will still get letters from PETA, though the possum may actually have enjoyed the ride.
Not to be outdone by a varmint drop, in Seaside Heights, New Jersey, they dropped a large ball with Snooki from “Jersey Shore” inside. Snooki fared no worse than the possum and will live to do whatever it is that Snooki does.
With celebrations like that to choose from, people wonder why I spend New Year’s Eve snowshoeing with the dogs. I’m usually in bed long before any celebrity can be dropped from the top of the tallest building in Woodland which isn’t very tall. Even if we had somebody as famous as Snooki to drop, it would be over so quickly that it would be sort of a disappointment. We don’t have possums in these parts.
But other things were falling out of the sky on New Year’s Eve. In Beebe, Arkansas, they had about four thousand dead birds drop out of the sky. Beebe sounds like an Andy Griffith kind of place. According to Wikipedia, the population is about 4,900, making it the second most populated place in the county, after Searcy. Makes you want to visit, doesn’t it? Not a lot happens in Beebe, and then on New Year’s Day dead birds are plummeting to earth. The birds are red-wing blackbirds and starlings. The cause of death is reported to be some kind of blunt-force trauma (which occurred before they hit the ground) that caused internal bleeding. The birds have a pretty good range, so it’s hard to know where the injury happened. They might have flown for miles before succumbing.
Nobody seems to know what caused it. There are dozens of websites on the topic. Some of them invite you to give your opinion on the cause of the bird deaths. No knowledge of birds, Beebe, or atmospheric conditions is necessary to vote. We Americans no longer rely on fact when there are opinion polls available. The options are “Strange Weather,” “Fireworks,” “Poison,” “Government Testing,” and “We’ll Never Know.” This particular website was not faith-based and omitted the obvious and very popular choice that “The Apocalypse is Upon Us.” That seems to be as good a reason as any for it to be raining dead birds. My personal guess is that they got too close to a jet, and the jet wash pummeled them. I have no idea if Beebe has an airport anywhere nearby, but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
About a hundred miles away, a stretch of river had some 83,000 dead drumfish wash up on the bank. According to the various comments on the websites I looked at, drumfish are bottom feeders. For some reason, people commenting on the incident considered that very important, though nobody explained why. Wildlife officials are pretty convinced the birds dropping out of the sky and the bottom-feeding fish are not related. They think the fish were diseased, since the other species of fish in the same river appear to be healthy. Still, this might be a week to steer clear of the fish sticks for school lunch in Arkansas.
Not to be outdone by Beebe, similar bird blizzards were reported in Kentucky and Louisiana, though in much smaller numbers. The Kentucky report was all of six birds, which hardly qualifies as a Biblical indicator. There were three-to-five hundred birds in Louisiana. They fell in Point Coupee, leading to suspicion that the deaths are related to towns with too many “e’s” in their names.
This has the making of all kinds of great conspiracy theories. Somehow, it will all be Obama’s fault some kind of Kenyan voodoo spell cast on the good people of Beebe for reasons that haven’t become clear yet. Goldman Sachs probably had life insurance on both the birds and the fish.
All I know for sure is that given a choice between Snooki or dead blackbirds falling out of the sky, I’ll take the blackbirds. But there is something portentous about starting out the New Year with it raining blackbirds over Arkansas.
Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland, and has been writing this column for nearly 25 years.