BIRD DEATHS - Fowl Play?

THIS HAS BEEN A GREAT MYSTERY TO ME FOR MANY YEARS! (And I challenge anyone to give me an answer!)

Where do birds go to die?

There must be millions of birds in the air over the UK at any one time, but when did you last have a dead bird at your feet?

Let's scale this down to a domestic level. From my house I can probably see one square mile of sky - and there are always birds flapping about in it. If I raced from my front garden to my back garden, I could count at least five birds flying overhead at all times of the day. Yet I've never had a bird just drop into my garden dead! I've had baby birds fall out of their nests and die. I've had birds killed by my horrible cat, and left on the patio, or dragged in through the cat-flap! But I've never had a bird just fall out of the sky - dead!

Considering the number of birds there are, at any one time, flying above us, there should be a few (at the very least!) that just have heart attacks and fall to the ground. Well, shouldn't there? Yet I've still to see a dead bird in the street, in supermarket carparks, in woods, in parks - anywhere!

They should be struggling for their last little birdie-breaths on our roofs and blocking up our gutters! They should be pegging-out on our pavements!

We should be up to our ankles in dead birds! We should be kicking them out of the way when we go to start our cars! We should be running them over with our shopping trolleys!

Everyone should have had, at least once in their lives, a dead bird plummet slap-bang onto their heads!

But no. Everything is strangely serene, undramatic and nuisance-free, on the bird death front.

Perhaps we have undercover, council-run, Bird Shovellers who trawl the streets in the dead of night bagging-up the frozen, feathered, corpses.

Or perhaps somewhere, in their tiny bird-brains, birds have learnt the secret of eternal life!

Or maybe the Big Bird in the sky just sends them a tweet, calling them upwards and off they soar, to peck at the Birdie Heaven door ...?