At least 60 birds dropped from the sky in South Australia, landing in a “scene that looked like a horror movie,” and authorities strongly believe that they were poisoned.
The lot of the birds found by rescuers on Tuesday and Wednesday were long-billed corellas, a protected species, and on the brink of death when they landed near a local primary school, according to reports by ABC Adelaide.
“Only two or three were actually deceased. The rest were just screaming on the ground. They couldn’t fly anymore, they were bleeding out of their mouths,” Sarah King, the founder of Casper’s Bird Rescue, told The Guardian.
King, whose staff member found the birds, said the corellas were “literally falling out of the trees” and likely died “a horrible, miserable and very stressful death.”
One Tree Hill Primary school, where the grisly discovery was made, posted to their Facebook group saying “the children in vacation care were very upset at the scene of birds falling from the sky and in pain, with blood coming out of their mouths.”
The little corella, a different species of the bird, are unprotected by the government and viewed by natives as a pest because they feed on crops and can harm infrastructure, with one local council even proposing to cull the birds by lethal gas. Still, only three of the 60 birds were of the unprotected species while the mass majority were protected.