Photos and videos showing scores of dead birds on the streets of Rome following the recent New Year’s Eve celebration have been doing the rounds online, fueling all sorts of conspiracy theories.
Hundreds of dead birds were found lying around the Termini train station, in Rome, Italy, on New Year’s Eve, and although the exact cause of this tragedy remains a mystery, animal groups have blamed the traditional fireworks show. The Italian capital had announced a fireworks ban ahead of New Year’s Eve, but it was largely ignored. The Italian branch of OIPA (International Animal Protection Organization) has called for a nationwide ban on selling fireworks and firecrackers for personal use, following this sad incident.
“I was on duty during the hours of my work when I was passing through via Cavour, a street near the central train station,” Diego Fennichia, a taxi driver from Rome, told Mail Online. “I did not understand at first what was on the ground, later I realized that they were dead birds, and there were hundreds of them. A really bad scene. It was about 00.40 and the causes could be due to the fireworks, at least that’s the first thing I thought. I’m not a scientist or a veterinarian, so I can’t take responsibility for saying with certainty that that was the reason.”
Fennichia’s first suspicion was shared by animal protection organizations as well, with OIPA spokeswoman Loredana Diglio saying that there were a variety of ways in which the birds could have died, as a result of the loud and bright firework display.
“It could be that they died from fear,” Diglio said. “They can fly up together and knock against each other, or hit windows or electric power lines. Let’s not forget they can also die of heart attacks.”
Photos of this tragic incident have been making news headlines for the past six days, and despite the fireworks being the main “suspect”, we still don’t know for sure what killed these birds. It’s not the first such mystery, either. A couple of years ago, almost 5,000 of birds were found dead on the shores of a lake in India.
