IDAHO FALLS — An additional 60 geese have been found dead after being struck by lighting in Idaho Falls on Saturday.
Initial reports indicated that only 51 geese had been killed at approximately 7:30 p.m. Saturday. Those birds were found at a conjoined parking lot near the Idaho National Laboratory in Idaho Falls.
But now, the Associated Press confirmed that 60 additional dead geese were recovered from the roof of a nearby warehouse.
In total, more than 100 geese were struck by lightning and fell dead, all landing within a 200-yard radius of each other.
The geese that were killed were snow geese and Ross’s geese.
“Several of them had ruptured stomachs,” Jacob Berl, a conservation officer for Idaho Falls Fish and Game, told the Journal earlier this week. “Their internal organs had ruptured. ... So that more than likely happened from the lightning itself or potentially from the impact of the crash. These geese are migrating at several thousand feet in the air, so if they’re falling out of the sky and hitting pavement, you can imagine what that does to a goose’s body.”
Berl said that any other cause of death is unlikely and that if it were the hail that killed them or influenza, they would’ve landed more spread out.
“It is common for diseases like influenza or other sorts of bird-borne diseases to cause mass die-offs of birds, but not for them to just fall out of the sky and land within a hundred yards of each other like that,” Berl said.
According to the Associated Press, some of the geese carcasses have been taken to a wildlife health lab in Caldwell for a necropsy.
Chuck Trost, a retired Idaho State University professor who taught ornithology and animal behavior, called this incident “bizarre.”
There was a lightning storm in the region the night the geese fell, with winds of 50 to 60 miles per hour and a small tornado that touched down three miles southeast of Atomic City.
There was minimal damage reported from the tornado, but golf ball-sized hail did some damage to Idaho Falls structures.
