One of the creepiest things that has ever happened to me personally was back in 2007 when we were looking for a new office in downtown Austin. I was worried about traffic and parking, but on the day we went to scope out the place, the whole metro area was like a ghost town. We parked right in front of our building -- a feat I failed to repeat in three years of actually occupying that same building. We walked around for a while and marveled at how few people were around.At some point we crossed the street and I had to pull Matt by the arm so that he could avoid stepping on a dead bird laying right in the middle of the crosswalk. It was gross, but didn't seem like anything too extraordinary. When we got home that day, we found out that downtown Austin had been voluntarily evacuated after a mass of dead birds had been found on our street. We somehow missed all the police detours and were wandering around in what was considered to be a "biological area of interest."But that wasn't the odd part. Later that week I was going to write a journal about the eerie episode, much like the one I am writing right now. In searching to find a URL to post with the journal, I made a discovery that has always stuck with me. At that same time, in several different parts of the world, birds were falling out of the sky, dead. There was an incident in Australia in which 5,000 birds died. Witnesses said that it looked like the sky was "raining dead birds." There were clouds of birds dying in SE Asia and 2500 dead mallards in Idaho -- all around the turn of the New Year. All the stories said the same thing -- birds dead, scientists baffled, no one has ever seen anything like this event before. I never found out what killed all those birds, all over the world, at the same time.The reason I write this journal today, four years is because I am worried it's starting again. Today, on the second day of the year, there are reports that 5,000 birds have fallen from the sky in Arkansas. Dead. I am going to keep watching. See if more turn up.
CNN: Falling Birds Died From Massive TraumaWhat does it say about me that my first thought is, "Uh, oh, Summer's obviously gearing up for a fight"? And that my second thought was how to use this as a plot hook for my game. So, does anyone have other weird nature news that they'd care to share that can easily be mined for plot hooks?
