Texel Island, early June, 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...."