MORE THAN 1,000 DEAD BIRDS FALL OUT OF THE SKY IN ARKANSAS!

Residents in a Arkansas city got a bizarre New Year's surprise on Saturday when they woke up to find their neighborhood covered with thousands of dead birds that appeared to have fallen from the sky.

Dozens of lawns, streets and rooftops for more than a mile in Beebe, Ark., were covered with the corpses of red-winged black birds. An aerial survey showed that no other dead birds were found outside that area.

Beebe residents describe the scene as something out of an Alfred Hitchcock film, and the town's mayor, Mike Robertson, said he and other officials initially thought news of the birds was a New Year's prank.

"I thought the mayor was messing with me when he called me," Milton McCullar, a town street supervisor, told local television station KATV. "He got me up at 4'oclock in the morning and told me we had birds falling out of the sky."

McCullar and a group of other residents spent Saturday and Sunday cleaning up the birds, some of which had been flattened by cars.

State officials aren't sure what killed the giant flock.

Karen Rowe, an ornithologist with Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, said the thought the birds could have been killed by lightening or a high-altitude hail storm.

The Game and Fish Commission has collected some of the birds and will test them on Monday to try to determine how they died, KATV reported.

The dead birds are an ominous start to 2011 for the town of Beebe, which was one of the cities declared a disaster area last January after severe storms and flooding wreaked havoc in nearly 30 counties in Arkansas.

"Last year we started with floods. This year birds," Robertson said.


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