We were out today running errands. It was a beautiful day, sunny and breezy. We drove over to the Associated Supermarket in Starrett City to pick up a couple of things. When we got out of the car, my aunt and I noticed a lot of birds. There are usually birds around Starrett City, stray seagulls from over the swamp. Sometimes you see like 10 to 20 of them flying around in a formed circle, like they see something worth eating. We kinda figure they hang around the parking lot by Associated because there’s food there, but it’s never anything really crazy. Before we got to the supermarket, a dark cloud appeared. The sky didn’t turn cloudy, there were still big puffy clouds, but there was this one dark cloud and when we looked up that’s when we noticed the birds, but it was more than a couple, more like 100.
I looked around the parking lot to see if anyone else noticed and there were a few people looking up in the sky, pointing. I asked one guy what he thought was going on, he said he didn’t know but that there were a lot of birds. And the birds weren’t flying around in a circle, like I had described before, it was more like they were confused and almost flying into each other.
We ran into the supermarket, shopped and came out slowly, looking up at the sky to see if the birds were still around. There were a few, like normal, but they. were still flying funny. We got in the car and drove up Pennsylvania Avenue to Linden Blvd and while we were stopped at the light, we saw the dark cloud again and looked up and saw the huge bunch of birds again, just flying around crazy. In the sky the birds looked black but through the skylight I could see that they were white. They were the Starrett City seaguls a little out of their jurisdiction, so we took out our phones and tried to take pictures.
The light changed and we drove to New Lots Avenue and noticed the cloud was moving, as were the birds. We stopped at my Aunt Louise’s house to drop off some stuff and the sky was clear, but when the cloud came, the birds came. Now it was getting weird because the seagulls didn’t usually come this far in, this was pigeon territory. We started panicking. My aunt ran inside to give Aunt Louise her stuff and I stayed outside to take pictures and called my brother-in-law to see if the birds in his neighborhood were acting weird. He lives by a park and he said the only weird thing he saw was that there weren’t any birds outside.
After that we sped home. It was only a few blocks away, but there was the cloud and there were the crazy seagulls, so we ran in the house and stayed there the rest of the weekend. I listened to the news that night but didn’t hear any mention of the crazed seagulls.
Below are the pictures we took and a map of Starrett City and the route we drove home. You can click on the thumbnails to enlarge the picture. In some of the pictures it looks like there are just black specs on the clouds, but those are actually birds.
Spooky.
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