Blackbird numbers in Beebe, Arkansas increasing at an exponential rate

An intelligent Russian blackbird

The birds are back in Beebe and in spite of last year’s mass disaster on New Year’s Eve, the flock’s population has grown enormously since then according to a story done by Arkansas news outlet, KATV.  In fact, a math professor who’s yard hosts an overwhelming number of blackbirds in its trees said that the population’s increase has been exponential.

Though he never complains about the noise or messiness of the birds, (in fact he impresses me as a nature lover), the professor does half-jokingly hope that he never gets the birds angry at him since he would not have a chance against even a small portion of the flock. Links to the article and some interviews done in October by a  travel documentary filmmaker, David Rush,  are here.

The October interviews are very interesting and include information not released by the mass media such as one resident describing ‘zombie birds’ that landed in the same area where the mass deaths occurred on New Year’s Eve. This happened frequently for months and occasional zombie blackbirds were still showing up when the interview was done in October.

A flock of intelligent American blackbirds

The interviews also indicate that residents in Beebe have either outright rejected the blunt force trauma due to fireworks’ explanation the government gave for the mass bird deaths, or at least are very skeptical that this could be the only factor for the birds’ uncharacteristic behavior.

Dead blackbirds falling from the sky are prominent in the imagery of a Danish film directed by Lars Von Trier that was released this year.  ‘Melancholia’ has been described as the most beautiful movie ever made about the longing for the end of the world. If you read the Nils Thorsen interview at the link, you’ll see it is the longing for the end, rather than the end itself that is the concept that interests this director.

Some speculate that the rain of dead blackbirds softly floating in the background of the ‘doomsday ballet’ that begins Melancholia symbolizes a series of smoke signals heralding a type of impending disaster.  Some think it is the global rise of fascism.  In fact, that worry does seem to be in the director’s anxiety closet, and when his concerns awkwardly spilled out at Cannes, the response was uncomfortable, to put it mildly.

Von Trier was abruptly misinterpreted and demonized, though it would have been better for most people, especially those with the most hysterical reactions, to scrutinize their own milieus and even the interior of their own psyches for fluttering signs of the incipient rise of fascist tendencies.  These signs are everywhere and are worrying some very ‘mainstream’, sophisticated individuals.

As serious of a concern as that is, could the fear of fascism alone explain Melancholia’s powerful undercurrent of apocalyptic nihilism?  Even mass genocides and world wars have not managed to wipe humanity from the face of the Earth, let alone destroy the planet itself.  Yet the film captivates the audience with its tale of a giant planet discovered to be on a collision course with Earth, much like the modern myths of Planet X or Nibiru battled so ferociously by NASA and other collections of rationalists.

I’ve been fascinated with the acceptance of this myth as fact by a large enough group of followers to cause the issue to be even addressed by scientists at all. This appeared so silly to me as to make the whole debate seem a contrived drama, but now I think that the ‘larger-than-life planet menacing the Earth’ is probably an archetype right out of the collective unconscious.

To me the huge planet represents a growing menace, most likely anthropogenic in the sense that the disaster is catalyzed or advanced in time by human alterations of the environment.  Maybe it represents overpopulation in general: a population swelling far beyond the capacity of the planet to sustain it.  Perhaps we are Nibiru, swelling larger exponentially in numbers like the blackbirds gathering now in Beebe, Arkansas.

We’ll see.  The signs aren’t good for on Christmas day, dead birds rained down on a highway in Montgomery County, Kentucky.  An investigation is in the works.

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