Bighorn River waterfowl die-off linked to starvation
A high number dead waterfowl reported on the Bighorn River south of Hardin in February was due to starvation, according to Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.
According to a May 5 press release, FWP staff collected mallard, geese and shorebird carcasses along a stretch of the Bighorn River from Afterbay to about three miles downstream of the Bighorn Fishing Access Site following numerous reports of sick and dead waterfowl in the area.
Staff initially suspected the mortality event was related to Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, but extensive testing at the department's Wildlife Heath Lab in Bozeman showed no positive results for the disease.
Additional testing was done by the U.S. Geological Survey's National Wildlife Health Center in Wisconsin, where specialists confirmed there was no evidence of infectious diseases. Instead, emaciation and starvation were the only ailments consistently found among the tested birds.
According to the press release, FWP said that mid-winter waterfowl surveys done along the Bighorn River showed a higher than average concentration of birds, 'which likely led to more competition for the limited food in the area.'
In addition, extreme cold temperatures and high snowfall in the region during early January likely contributed to limited availability of food.
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What to know about earthquakes in the Northeast
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An earthquake that struck Charleston, South Carolina, in 1886 measured at a magnitude 7.0, according to the USGS. "There's the potential for a damaging earthquake to occur in the Eastern U.S., but it's pretty rare -- every 100 or 200 years," Boyd said. There may be several unknown fault lines in the Northeast Faults that have been mapped in the Central and Eastern U.S. are "many, many millions of years old" -- many produced during the Mesozoic era, Boyd said. Those faults have had time to heal. And while some earthquakes may be originating from them, new cracks have likely been forming, Steckler said. Regions in the upper Mississippi embayment are probably reactivating older faults that formed when the rift basin was formed, Boyd said. In New Jersey, some of the faults from the Mesozoic rifting could be reactivating, he added. "When stress builds up, if there's a pre-existing weakness, the Earth will use it," Steckler said. "So, it will use older faults when it can." Earthquakes in the Northeast tend to be active for a short period of time before the activity shifts to another area, Gates said. "These faults get active for a year, and then they go dead," he said, adding that it could be 50, 100 years before they become active again. But since the earthquakes in the region don't tend to rupture to the surface, researchers can't pinpoint exactly where the faults they are occurring are, Boyd said. Gates believes the region is amid peak activity of a 40-year cycle and that an uptick of activity will likely continue for another couple of years. "Within a couple of years, we'll start getting less and less, and then there'll be a period where we won't get many earthquakes at all," Gates said.
