Sent in by Rip-plugger, thanks.
I'm still not sure how this happened but saw it on several news sites.

I thought about it a bit. Some say it could be an extra-terrestrial life force. My thinking goes toward 2 possible scenarios:

1. Some type of lightning or weather based mass killing. I have some doubts about that because of the sheer numbers of birds that were killed. I still consider it as a possibility.
2. A shock wave or some type of sonic weapon that the military was testing in that area. I know people with military service who say when pods of whales get off course, it's because the military (navy) has been doing high-tech sonar experiments in the area, which effs with the sonar of the whales.

You're never going to get any admissions by this from the military. Hey, I understand the need to keep things like this classified. However, doing so sometimes lends stupport to other theories. People don't have all the answers, so they begin to fill in the blanks with other plausible theories. Or, they make things up to fit their perception of the environment around them. I like science-based explanations because to me, they're the easiest to accept. They fit a logical pattern, if you can explain things that way.

JMO, other opinions welcome.

Here's the story:

msnbc.com staff and news service reports





3:23 PM EST January 3, 2011

Preliminary autopsies on 17 of the up to 5,000 blackbirds that fell on this town indicate they died of blunt trauma to their organs, the state's top veterinarian told NBC News on Monday.
Their stomachs were empty, which rules out poison, Dr. George Badley said, and they died in midair, not on impact with the ground.
That evidence, and the fact that the red-winged blackbirds fly in close flocks, suggests they suffered some massive midair collision, he added. That lends weight to theories that they were startled by something.
Earlier Monday, the estimated number of dead birds was raised to between 4,000 and 5,000, up sharply from the initial estimate of 1,000.
Keith Stephens, a spokesman for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, provided the new numbers.
Residents of the small town of Beebe awoke Saturday to find thousands of dead blackbirds littering a 1.5-square-mile area. The birds inexplicably dropped dead, landing on homes, cars and lawns.

Violent weather rumbled over much of the state Friday, including a tornado that killed three people in Cincinnati, Ark. Lightning could have killed the birds directly or startled them to the point that they became confused. Hail also has been known to knock birds from the sky.

The director of Cornell University's ornithology lab in Ithaca, N.Y., said the most likely suspect is violent weather. It's probable that thousands of birds were asleep, roosting in a single tree, when a "washing machine-type thunderstorm" sucked them up into the air, disoriented them, and even fatally soaked and chilled them.

"Bad weather can occasionally catch flocks off guard, blow them off a roost, and they get hurled up suddenly into this thundercloud," lab director John Fitzpatrick said.

Rough weather had hit the state earlier Friday, but the worst of it was already well east of Beebe by the time the birds started falling, said Chris Buonanno, a forecaster with the National Weather Service in North Little Rock.

If weather was the cause, the birds could have died in several ways, Fitzpatrick said.