Residents of Peceliema Settlement, near Naweni Village in Cakaudrove, were witnesses to a strange phenomenon, when birds mysteriously began falling from the sky on Monday afternoon.
A video circulated on Facebook showed residents watched as birds nose-dived to the ground, fatally wounding themselves on impact.
Roko Tui Cakaudrove Filimone Naiqumu said their conservation officer, a veterinarian from the Agriculture Ministry and personnel from the Biosecurity Authority of Fiji had been dispatched to investigate the incident.
Meanwhile, in an interview, regional program coordinator for BirdLife International Pacific Partnership Secretariat Mark O’Brien said after watching the videos, his initial view was that the birds may have died from poison.
“It may be a natural pesticide that people used that was misapplied or used in wrong doses,” he said.
Mr O’Brien added the birds could have also contracted the poison from insects or invertebrates that fed on plants treated with the wrongly prepared weedicide.
“When you look at the distribution of birds in Fiji, Mynah birds are found in agricultural farmlands, and they are, maybe, the only species that eat insects and invertebrates from the grass, and I guess that this is how they may have contracted the toxin.
“Maybe since these insects or invertebrates are dead in numbers, birds find it easy to eat them by flocking to feed which is why there are a lot of them infected.
“Let’s not rule out the probability that there are other species of birds also dead in other areas of the forest so we need to await the results of investigations by personnel.”
