^{What are these little birdies trying to tell us?}

Five thousand red-winged blackbirds fall dead from the skies over a short stretch of Arkansas highway. Another 500 in Louisiana. Another 50 in Kentucky. Hundreds more in Sweden and New Zealand.

An estimated 100,000 drum fish go belly-up in the Arkansas River, joined by an estimated two million of their fishy brethren in the Chesapeake Bay. Meanwhile, the sale of fish in one Brazilian coastal region is suspended after more than a hundred tons of dead sardines float in on the tides. At least 40,000 dead crabs litter beaches in the United Kingdom. There are other reports of fish kills in Haiti, Australia, and Wales.

And that’s just in the last week.

The scientific explanation for what some wags have dubbed “The Aflockalypse” seems to be: “it happens.” Some of the US bird kills could have been caused by the atmospheric conditions that accompanied the massive, deadly weather systems that passed through the Plains and Southeast over the holiday weekend. Fish kills in winter are usually due to too-quick drops in water temperature.

But the growing reports of these mass deaths has generated a lot of comment online, and not (just) from the Tinfoil Hat Brigade. You don’t have to believe in the evils of Corexit or the dangers of HAARP or the prophecies of Nostradamus to see the of thousands of crumpled little birds laying in the road on New Years’ Day as grimly symbolic.

Everything seems to have gone awry. Our natural world is totally out-of-whack. Forget the mysterious bee apocalypse and the tar balls continually barfing up on Gulf beaches...try to remember the last day you weren’t hearing about some new extreme weather record. Even if you don’t believe in global warming, it’s hard to deny global weirding.  

In our constructed world, the old rules no longer apply. Heretofore hardworking people can’t find jobs, and responsible homeowners can’t keep their homes. One or two bad breaks is all it takes to put entire families on the streets. Government and municipal services seem to be undergoing some kind of mass kill of their own. You want symbolism? A young man in Manhattan, depressed and on the verge of eviction, jumped out of his apartment window nine stories above West 45th Street. He landed in a huge pile of uncollected garbage and survived.

Symbolism is a language we speak to guide ourselves through life. If you accept that mass animal deaths are relatively normal events, and that  -- if you look hard enough -- you’ll find reports of large and small kills all over the world, then it stands to reason that we’re only forcing it into a pattern because there’s something larger narrative we need to see.

This begs the question: What do we need to see right now? What story are we trying to uncover? And, most importantly, what do we do with what we see?