Thousands of blackbirds fall dead from sky

[Monica]

uncorrelated events never equal causation, so where are we left?

We are left with anomalous events for which we have not yet found an explanation.

I haven't read those reports.

Ah. Have you been following these stories at all?

I guess there will always be
reports that people will use to support their favorite theory.

Why do you suppose a theory might become a favored theory?

It's not intended to explain the frequency and magnitude of the events. Perhaps there is some important historical research to be done then?

Absolutely.

However, the very fact that most of us have never heard of such events before, might be for the simple reason that such events have never happened before, at least not on such a widespread level. (That is every bit as feasible as what you have proposed...that such events have happened but just didn't get sensationalized as they have now.)

Strange for me due to the expectation of correlation, yet none forthcoming.

Correlation of the various animal deaths?

At this point, those explanations offered have been rather mundane.

...and totally unsatisfactory. Only a handful of theories have been offered. None have been proven. Most of the events don't even have any suggested causes at all. Taken in total, the situation is far from mundane.

Then again, one mass bird death involved diet, while another blunt force trauma.

Those are not proven causes, but just theories. Furthermore, even if they were proven, that does not explain all the others.

Cricket and gnats swarming, while also dealing with some type of animal behavior, are not really anomalous.

That is precisely my point! We've all heard of events like crickets swarming...why? Because they're normal. They don't happen often, but they happen enough for most of us to at least know about them. They're within the range of normalcy.

Not so with these recent animal deaths.

There may very well be a portion, or "core" of the incidents that have the same cause - maybe even a fantastically novel cause. However, can you see that such a cause will be even more difficult to ultimately find due to the forced mix-in of inevitable mundane and normal incidents, and the premature promotion of far-out pet theories that serve to reinforce bias?

Sure. That can't be helped.

Thus they may be said to be correlated in time, but correlation does not equal causation.

My point wasn't that they were correlated in cause, but that the correlation in time adds to the weirdness factor.