In a development no one saw coming (except maybe Hitchcock), America’s latest wildfire threat isn’t just drought, climate change, or that one guy who thought setting off fireworks in a forest was a great idea. Science has determined that birds aren’t just a nuisance when they poop on your windshield or sing at dawn. Turns out, they can actually start fires! Birds do some dumb things – flying into windows, eating plastic, trying to land on my head when I’m trying to enjoy a peaceful walk – but this takes the cake. They’re basically nature’s little arsonists.
That’s right—our fine feathered friends, once content with chirping innocently at sunrise and stealing crumbs from park benches, have apparently taken up a new hobby: spontaneous combustion. According to a 2022 article in The Wildlife Society Bulletin, birds perched on power lines are getting electrocuted, their plumage catching fire, and then plummeting to Earth like tiny, feathery Molotov cocktails, igniting wildfires across western North America. As if wildfires weren’t already bad enough, now we’ve got flaming birds falling from the sky.
The culprits, it seems, are a mix of climate change, human population growth in fire-prone areas, and power lines that seem to act like tiny electric chairs for birds. These avian infernos have been documented across the U.S., but they’re especially fond of torching California, because, of course, California.
44 cases of bird-induced blazes were reported between 2014 and 2018. That’s right—44 fiery fowls raining down destruction. Now in 2024, over the past two months, the flaming carcasses of electrocuted birds have started three wildfires in Colorado…and those are just the ones we know about. Experts warn there could be many more, lurking just beyond the tree line, waiting to drop a burning crow into your backyard.
