A distressed comment on a recent post reviewing Vicky Hird’s book Rebugging the Planet (see here) chimes only too well with a deeply worrying newsletter from Arthur Firstenberg at the Cellphone Task Force a few weeks ago.
Sandwich terns and bird flu
Bird flu is believed to be highly contagious, affecting both commercially reared birds and colonies of wild birds and spreading, in a matter of days, across wide distances. Yet the progress of the disease among wild bird colonies, specifically sandwich terns, in both Holland and northern France has not followed this pattern. While two large colonies of sandwich terns in Texel and Waterdunen in Holland were wiped out, another smaller colony at Yerseke Moer, only 20 miles from Waterdunen, remained perfectly healthy and suffered no deaths.
Similarly in France. At the Platier d’Oye nature reserve near the port of Calais, 3,000 birds died in a few weeks at the end of May. But the even larger reserve at Polder de Sébastopol just south of Brittany suffered no casualties.
So what is going on?
Phone masts?
An investigation into phone mast activity around Holland and in the Platier d’Oye region of northern France showed that the three sites where the terns had suffered catastrophic deaths were not only close to busy shipping lanes and areas of dense population with extremely high mobile phone usage, but in all three of them the number of 4G and 5G phone masts and antennae had almost doubled in the six months previous to May 2022.
The two sites on which there had been no deaths were in isolated areas of very low populations density and nowhere near shipping or a port – so therefore with very low cell phone usage. A couple of antennae had been added at each reserve but they were little used.
How could cell phone radiation affect the birds?
As Arthur Firstenberg points out, in the medical literature there are more than 76,000 studies on the biological effects of electromagnetic radiation including research which suggests that:
A sudden dramatic increase in the number of antennae and frequencies whose source is within a breeding colony or on its border is lethal as nesting birds cannot avoid the radiation.
He goes on to explain that the amount of radiation emitted by the towers depends on the human population and how heavily they use their mobile phones – and that traveling over water both reflects and amplfies the radiation signal.
As a colleague pointed out, being close to areas of high human habitation could mean that the bird colonies were also subject to many other sorts of pollution which might have had a deleterious effect on their health. But in previous years they seem to have been able to cope with that and still breed successfully. So what changed in 2022? Only the number of phone masts/antennae and the resulting levels of electromagnetic radiation.
Death from radiation or bird flu?
At this stage, nobody knows. Could the dramatic increase in radiation resulting from the doubling of the numbers of antennae around Texel, Waterdunen and Platier d’Oye have created an extra stress with the birds could not cope and which killed them?
Or could that excess radiation have so weakened their systems that they had no defence against the bird flu virus when it arrived and it therefore killed them?
Or is there yet another factor that has so far been totally overlooked?…..
To read the whole of Arthur Firstenberg’s facinating article log into the CellPhoneTaskForce website here.
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