Where do birds go to die?

An interesting story:

*Where do birds go to die?* 
        
Strange question, isn't it, but the answers are even stranger, or probably there is no answer at all. 

The world is populated with flocks of birds, but strangely, one never sees bodies of dead birds lying around.   Rarely one does see bird remains left behind by a careless cat or a pigeon killed in flight by the sharp kite string during the makar sankrat kite festival. But, lying around dead from a natural cause? Never!

So do birds live forever? When no answer comes to mind, what does one do? Well for many unanswered questions one does ask Google! That’s exactly what I did.  *Guess what? Google had no logical answer!* 

To find the answer to my question, I browsed bird watching sites skimmed through ornithology resources but with no luck; just vague and funny answers.  

Then I came across a very interesting article on ‘Dying Pattern of birds” and cited below was a controversial theory by Late Cork Bishop Cornelius Lucey that begins with the Question: “Where do birds go to die?”

Bishop challenged anyone to produce evidence of a bird that had died from a natural cause.   Bishop Lucey distinguished death from natural causes and death by predator, or death through car accident. Death through accidental or deliberate means resulted in mangled bodies we all have seen, but it is a fact, dead birds are so difficult to locate that scientists use birders to help track population in order to estimate number of annual avian deaths.

The Bishop, who had an in-depth knowledge of the life-patterns of bees, conducted the study of birds, with the same gusto. In the case of bees, the Bishop explained that bees died, by rising, into the “upper air’, and there they literally were destroyed through a natural disintegration process. 

After the study of birds he concluded that as birds had an inner sensory device, which told them when to migrate and like the bees they too had an inner sensory device which told them when it was time to die, or when their life cycle was complete.   On the premonition of death, they too like the bees rise up higher and higher till they disintegrate in the upper air.   This unpublished theory is the closest answer to my query. 

This triggers the following thought: If we go by the Bishop’s hypothesis on the dying pattern of birds for which as of date there is no counter solid scientific theory, then it would not be out of place to conclude that birds are at a higher plane than humans since the birds actually KNOW when they are going to die, something that even the so-called evolved, aware and intelligent human race does not know!   That when a bird knows that it has lived enough, seen enough, it can happily leave its body at will by flying high-up and just disintegrating; no age related aches, pains of suffering.

*Thereby lingers the thought : Is Man, the self-proclaimed most evolved living being really at the apex of evolution pyramid?* 

Or please tell where do the birds go to die...

(Another WhatsApp message. Source: unkonwn)