Birds on Texel Island

by Arthur Firstenberg, Cellular Phone Task Force
July 28, 2022

“The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”

cried Chicken Little.

And the sky fell, and no one listened, and all was still.

A scholarly literature search for “electromagnetic” + “biological effects” produces the astonishing number of 76,400 studies, more studies than for most other environmental threats, yet the world continues on, looking yet blind, listening yet deaf, mistaking silence for comfort, the advancing flames for a bright future.

On the Dutch island of Texel, being the south end of a line of islands separating the Wadden Sea from the North Sea, a large breeding colony of seabirds called Sandwich terns (“great terns” in Dutch) made headline news last month by dying. Of the 7,000 birds nesting in the De Petten nature reserve until the end of May, none were left by the middle of June. 3,000 avian corpses were collected, and the rest either died or abandoned their nests.

The correspondent who sent me this news, Antonia in the Netherlands, also sent me to a Dutch website that monitors all cell towers and antennas throughout the country. The tern catastrophe was being blamed on “bird flu” and she suspected something else might be going on. When I looked at the website I was floored. The

first 35 dead terns at De Petten were found on May 29, 2022. There are three cell towers on the edge of the reserve, and actually in the territory which the terns inhabit. According to the website, 18 new 4G antennas had just been added to those towers – 6 by Vodafone to its 83-foot tower on May 25, 2022, and 12 by KPN to its 108-foot tower on May 29, 2022. The number of frequencies emitted by those two towers had increased overnight from 5 to 11.

In addition to having all those antennas right at the reserve, De Petten is located on the northern edge of a waterway that separates the North Sea from the Wadden Sea, and a large number of antennas on both sides of that waterway — the antennas in Den Helden to the south and the antennas on Texel to the north — are aimed at that busy waterway, which is intensely used by the ships that continually pass through it. Consequently, according to my research, there are a total of 105 4G antennas within 7 miles of De Petten that are aimed directly at it.

Were Texel’s Sandwich terns already in bad shape from all the radiation they had been exposed to in the last few years? And did the sudden increase in both the number of antennas and the number of frequencies finally kill them?

I decided to investigate further. What I have discovered, both in the Netherlands and elsewhere, is consistent but not simple. Here are some rough rules:

A sudden dramatic increase in the number of antennas and frequencies whose source is within a breeding colony or on its border is lethal. Nesting birds cannot avoid the radiation; they must either abandon their nests or die.

The effect of antennas aimed at a breeding colony from a distance depends on the human population. In a sparsely populated region, the antennas emit little radiation and few frequencies because few people are using them. By contrast, cell towers located in major ports are heavily used, both by residents and ships, and emit maximal radiation. The same is true of antennas aimed at heavily used shipping lanes.

Distance does not matter as much as terrain and tower height. The radiation from a taller tower travels further. And when there is nothing but water between the tower and the bird colony, the water reflects and amplifies the signal and distance matters very little.

4G towers are generally worse than 5G towers. This is because 4G towers broadcast their radiation in all directions while 5G towers emit most of their radiation in focused beams, aimed directly at people holding 5G phones in their hands.

With these rules in mind, let us look at a few other breeding colonies of Sandwich terns and see what has happened to them this year:

Another large breeding colony of Sandwich terns made headlines a bit later, and for the same reason: the one at Waterdunen, at the opposite end of the Netherlands, in Zeeland province. Like De Petten, the Waterdunen nature reserve is located on a busy shipping lane at the entrance to a busy port. The largest colony of these birds in the Netherlands, Waterdunen hosted 7,000 pairs of terns that flew up from Africa to breed there this spring. But on June 24, 2022, it was reported that 4,600 dead adult and young Sandwich terns had been collected there during the previous two weeks. By the end of June, this colony no longer existed either.

The nature reserve at Waterdunen has 318 heavily-used 4G antennas aimed in its direction from distances of from 0.5 to 8 miles. Most of these emit between 1,000 and 2,000 watts of radiation each. 46 of these antennas are new, having been added to existing towers in April, May and June 2022. One 55-foot tower less than 2 miles down the beach from Waterdunen was upgraded on May 18, 2022 from 6 antennas to 12 and from 2 frequencies to 4. Another, 40-foot tower in the same location was upgraded on June 22, 2022 from 6 antennas to 18 and from 2 frequencies to 6. As Sandwich terns live on fish, those towers are within the foraging area for that colony.

Did the same thing happen to all nesting Sandwich terns in the Netherlands? No. Just 20 miles from Waterdunen was a small, healthy colony of terns at a nature reserve called Yerseke Moer. And from April to July, i.e. throughout the 2022 nesting season, this colony thrived and no dead birds were found there. Unlike De Petten and Waterdunen, this reserve is located in a relatively isolated place, is not near a major port and is not on a shipping lane. A total of 35 4G antennas are aimed at this reserve from distances of up to 8 miles. Only two of those antennas have been added since April.

Likewise in France, two very large colonies of terns had two completely different experiences. At the Platier d’Oye nature reserve near the port of Calais, a colony of 3,000 Sandwich terns began nesting in April. The first 100 dead birds were discovered on May 20, and within a few weeks the colony was almost completely wiped out.

The situation at Platier d’Oye is similar to that further north in Texel: dozens of new 4G and 5G antennas were added near the reserve during the months of May and June. 3 new 4G antennas and 6 new 5G antennas were added to an existing 90-foot cell tower bordering the reserve. Another 6 new 4G antennas and 6 new 5G antennas were added to an existing 140-foot tower about two miles to the southeast. Another 6 new 4G antennas and 6 new 5G antennas were added to an existing 95-foot tower about two miles to the east. At this writing there are the astounding number of 355 antennas of all kinds on 26 towers at 13 locations ranging from 10 feet tall to 255 feet tall within about 4 miles of this nature reserve.

An even larger colony — the largest breeding colony of Sandwich terns in France — had no disease during the 2022 breeding season. It is called the Polder de Sébastopol and was host to several thousand pairs of nesting birds. But like Yerseke Moer, it is on an isolated island with few human residents. The island’s land area is largely devoted to parks, nature reserves and visitor accommodations. None of the antennas on the two cell towers a half mile west of the Polder are aimed at it. And even though there are a large number of antennas between one and four miles away that are aimed directly at the Polder, no ships pass by offshore and those antennas are little used except by visitors to the reserve walking its trails.

Looking at the details and different experiences at particular breeding colonies of these birds, the official story breaks down. How can one make sense of the extermination of so many of these birds in a matter of a few weeks in such widely scattered places? According to the bird conservation organizations, bird flu is so contagious that it spreads among Sandwich terns all over Europe in a matter of days, yet it is so non-contagious that a small colony of terns 20 miles away escapes scot- free. Bird flu travels from one end of the Netherlands to the other in a few days, but not between two Dutch colonies 20 miles apart, and not between the two largest colonies in France?

Apparently the conservation organizations also do not think it strange that suddenly and for the first time ever, in 2022, bird flu is (a) killing Sandwich terns and (b) is occurring during their breeding season. In decades of monitoring them, bird flu has never affected Sandwich terns before anywhere in the world. And it has always been a seasonal disease, occurring only in autumn and winter, and has never before affected any types of wild birds in spring and summer until 2022. It has also never affected so many different kinds of wild birds at once – terns, seagulls, avocets, gannets, skuas, guillemots, puffins, oystercatchers, ducks, geese, godwits, pheasants, magpies, sanderlings, storks, cranes, pelicans, herons, swans, loons, sparrows, pigeons, red-winged blackbirds, owls, cormorants, grebes, dunlins, crows, ravens, bald eagles, hawks, falcons, vultures. Both the bird organizations and the authorities colonies and handle dead birds. But they should begin questioning the cause of such an unprecedented catastrophe.

There is no doubt that sick birds have tested positive for a virus called H5N1. But when every testing laboratory is constantly amplifying fragments of that virus in untold numbers of PCR tests, one has to suspect that the walls, floors, air, equipment, and personnel in the testing laboratories are contaminated with this virus. When one remembers that samples from a goat, a quail and a papaya, sent to the National Health Laboratory of Tanzania, all came back positive for COVID-19, the results of PCR tests, whether for people, birds, or fruit, should be regarded with caution. Yes, both birds and people are getting sick and dying, but there is another obvious factor that is being ignored. The tendency to blame all illness on microorganisms is destroying our world.

It is the uncontrolled irradiation of our world that is killing us and wiping out all the birds. Both 4G and 5G antennas are being erected more quickly and in greater numbers than ever before, not only on land but even on the surface of the sea. Wherever there are offshore wind farms, the cell phone companies are placing cell towers on those platforms. Seabirds will soon not only have no place to lay their eggs and raise their young, but they will not even be able to hunt for their food and feed their young without being irradiated. The largest company building cell towers on the surface of the sea is called Tampnet. Here is a map of all their towers and their coverage areas in the North Sea and the Gulf of Mexico: https://www.tampnet.com/coverage-maps

In 1918, at the very height of the Spanish influenza, attempts by medical teams in Boston and San Francisco to demonstrate the contagious nature of the flu met with complete and resounding failure. They collected mucous secretions from the mouths, noses, throats, and bronchi of sick flu patients in various stages of the disease and transferred these secretions to the noses, throats, and eyes of hundreds of healthy volunteers. They injected blood from sick flu patients into healthy volunteers. The had healthy volunteers sit nose to nose with severely ill flu patients while they spoke to each other and then the patient coughed five times directly in the face of the volunteer. None of the volunteers got sick in any way. These experiments were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, and Public Health Reports.

Horses also came down with influenza, and similar failure attended attempts to transfer influenza from one horse to another. As a result of these experiments, Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Watkins-Pitchford wrote that he could find no evidence that influenza was ever spread directly from one horse to another.

Many are the scientists, over the years, who have observed that influenza, whether in humans, horses, birds, or pigs, is an exceedingly strange disease. No one has ever explained why the flu is seasonal, for example. Or why flu epidemics end. Or why out-of-season epidemics do not spread. Or why flu epidemics explode over whole countries at once, and disappear just as miraculously, as if suddenly prohibited. Or how human influenza can spread around the world in days, and has always done so, even centuries ago when neither airplanes, automobiles, railroads, nor steamships existed. At least 23 scientists over the years, including Richard Shope, the scientist who first identified the flu virus in 1931, have published papers questioning the contagious nature of the flu and/or suggesting an electrical cause for it.

Chapters 7, 8 and 9 of my critically important book, The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life, are devoted to a complete, detailed examination of the history and science of influenza. Chapter 16, the longest chapter in the book, is devoted in part to the effects of electromagnetic radiation on birds. I suggest that all bird conservation organizations should acquire my book and read it carefully.

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cover image credit: JonPauling