A crashing of starlings

Both the Daily Mail (and the BBC for those who don't like the former...) are reporting on a "mysterious" appearance of dead starlings in a small area in Somerset.

The birds were spotted falling onto the entrance of a house in Coxley in Somerset on Sunday 7 March... "They had fallen on to the ground in quite a small area, about 12ft (3.6m) in diameter... They appeared to be in good condition other than injuries that they appear to have suffered when they hit they ground.

'The sky was raining starlings. One of my neighbours saw them. They seemed to just fall out of the sky. About 70 were dead straight away...

Speculation includes pesticides, herbicides, HAARP, flying into a glass conservatory, and crash landing while escaping predators.  The first several don't explain the confined distribution, and the last is unbelievable if they are implying crashing into the ground.

We'll offer a different explanation.  Starlings are famous for their mass flocking; TYWKIWDBI has previously posted two videos of the phenomenon.  As a representative from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds noted "Starlings have natural habits and behaviour, when flying around in a murmuration they relate each movement to the seven birds closest to them.  They are hardwired into doing this and on instinct they stay away from each other."  I would bet tuppence that a predator flew into the murmuration in the same way that piscine predators enter the baitball of herring, and that in the ensuing panic the birds collided in ways that caused fractures of wings and skulls and then plummeted to the earth.

Case closed.