[blahblah4332]

So far food scarcity looks like the most plausible explanation. Someone needs to get a massive campaign together in flyover zones to get people to scatter food for them. Assuming appropriate feed for these species is even widely available in those areas.

Probably too little too late in this case though... I guess we just update the wildfire documents to include care for migratory species and hope there's a next time

[throwaway5752]

I want to point out the issues of 1) commenting on areas where one doesn't have expertise 2) not recognizing that and find credible sources of information.

No offense, but even though you projected confidence I doubted you had any ornithology background. Since I didn't either, I recognized my lack of expertise and did some good faith basic research, informally speaking, to see if I could find out what the most likely explanation was.

I found a professor at Colorado St. U. with a verified account on twitter (https://twitter.com/Kyle__Horton) who had retweeted https://twitter.com/salasphorus/status/1304973069056786432. In this case the second tweet was someone with a masters in wildlife biology research with the USFW in this area.

It turns out it is food scarcity, but among insectivorous passerines (perching birds). Numerous amateur birdwatching sites that are easy to find note how hard it is to get them to your feeders since they do not eat seeds.

Scattering food would probably be ineffective.

It also suggests that there is a problem in a lower trophic level. We've read a lot about insect die offs. Now we seem to have a die off in migratory insectivores. Maybe it's because of fires triggering an early migration that is not timed with insect population cycles. Maybe it's not, I don't know. It seems like an area to be greatly concerned about.

[dang]

Please don't cross into personal attack on HN. HN is only an internet forum. If you have better information to contribute, that's wonderful, but there's no requirement for other commenters to be specialists, or to quote specialists. Human conversation is far broader than that, and needs to be.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[throwaway5752]

I know tone is hard online, but I never intended it a personal attack for a moment. Looking at it, I can see how it can be interpreted as condescending, though. I meant what I said: I am not a specialist, either. However, this was the top comment on this submission when I replied, and it was factually incorrect. I did not spend a long time searching for the links I cited. Dang, you understand running an online community better than I ever will, likely. What is the right call on civility vs correctness? How could I have done better here?

[csharptwdec19]

> Scattering food would probably be ineffective.

We could still try scatter food.

The way this year has been we might as well help Cthulhu along and make bugs fall from the sky ourselves.

[throwaway5752]

Or we could do something else that's easy and useless to make ourselves feel better, instead of dealing with the hard problems of insecticide overuse and CO2 induced climate change.