Dead Birds and Terrorism
January 8th, 2007 at 9:25 am by Chad (Chad's Blog)
This morning, they’ve closed most of downtown Austin because of the mysterious deaths of about a dozen pigeons. The fire department was called in to collect the animals and send them to a lab to figure out what killed them. Preliminary air tests showed nothing out of the ordinary that might have caused the birds to all die together.
What strikes me most about this situation is how we might have responded to this same event prior to the attacks of September 11th, 2001. We would have completely disregarded it and it wouldn’t have even merited a mention in local news. Terrorism has affected us so fundamentally that everyone — myself included — is anxious for these lab results.
To me, the most likely explanation is pranksters or the cold, but we’ll see.
Update 12:53pm: Looks like there is no credible threat. See the complete story here.