Thousands of migratory birds dropped dead in NM, possibly due to climate change

Scientists researching the 2020 incident in which thousands of birds dropped dead while migrating through New Mexico was possibly caused by climate change.

Jeanne Fair, a Los Alamos National Lab scientist and one of the researchers studying the September 2020 incident, said the birds experienced three different extreme weather events.

"It was literally within a few days that we saw a mass mortality of birds," Fair told Albuquerque TV station KOB. "We had had some extreme high temperatures in Colorado and New Mexico, and then we had a cold front come in that that was sort of extreme cold event. At the same time, we had large catastrophic forest fires in the region, and so it was very, very smoky as well."