For the last five days wildlife experts and officers from the forestry commission have picked up more than 1,000 turtle doves as well as other birds including pigeons.
Yesterday alone 300 corpses were recovered with all of them having a blue tinge to their beaks, which scientists say indicates poisoning or hypoxia which is lack of oxygen that can confuse animals.
The incident in the town of Faenza in northern Italy comes after a series of similar cases across the world in the United States and Sweden.
It is not just birds that have been affected, with millions of dead fish also washing up on river banks and coastlines.
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It reminds me of Philip Wylie's prophetic 1972 book, The End of the Dream.
Philip Wylie is probably best known for his early science fiction classic (1932) When Worlds Collide. The End of the Dream was his last book, and it has far more in common with his other great piece of writing, Generation of Vipers (1942). Vipers was a diatribe against almost everything American, from 'Mom' to apple pie, and is still an effective read today. The End of the Dream is Wylie's rant against all the ecological sins that man is committing. I first read this when in was first published in 1972, and many of the images he paints in this book have remained with me ever since.
The book is structured as a look back from the 2030s to just where man went wrong, at what places he had a chance to change things for the better but blithely ignored them. For by 2030 there are only four million people left alive, most living in enclosed 'bubble' townships and still very much on guard for whatever the next ecological catastrophe will be. As a structure for a novel, this is not terrible, but it definitely leads to an episodic approach, and because Wylie really doesn't present any strong, well defined, and continuing characters who exist over the course of this period (the ones that are there are almost stick-figure place holders), this book does not work as a novel at all.
Where this book does work is the incredible searing images he paints of various disasters, from a SST crashing into a New York skyscraper (due to a multi-state wide power outage, not deliberately), to the death wave moving up 5th Avenue from a deadly concentration of noxious gases, to the golf course built over a landfill that suddenly collapses into a bubbling stew of toxic chemicals. Perhaps the sharpest, most biting image is of a sudden attack by trillions of mutated sea worms that come ashore and attack practically anything moving, with the sharp irony that the defense against these creatures is to spread oil all around the chosen defended area, which naturally will, in time, become another eco disaster.