UNEXPLAINED MYSTERIES II

	In 2004, an estimated 300 hippopotamuses in Uganda's Queen Elizabeth National Park died after drinking water contaminated with anthrax. The lethal bacteria can frequently be found in the pools of stagnant water that form during Uganda's dry season. The country has suffered from occasional anthrax outbreaks since the 1950s and because of their semiaquatic nature, hippos are particularly vulnerable to contamination. That's probably why a massive kill happened again in June 2010, when 82 hippos and nine buffalo died after drinking water from Kazinga Channel, which links Lake Edward and Lake George, also in the Queen Elizabeth National Park.
	Legend has it that in 1754 in the hamlet of Windham in the Connecticut colony, the Battle of the Frogs commenced. No, we're not talking about the French. It was literally a battle pitting frog against frog. At the time, a number of men in the area had departed to fight the French and the Indians. One hot night in June, the remaining men in the town heard screeching and began to fire wildly, believing they were under attack. The next morning they discovered that the sounds had come from frogs that were either battling over the last remnants of water in a drought-stricken pond or just ticked off at each other. They never really knew why the whole episode occurred, but hundreds, some said thousands, of frogs died.
	They crashed into cars and boats, huddled in yards and were struck by vehicles. Hundreds of pelicans from Oregon to Mexico were found either acting funny or dead in 2009, and no one was really sure why. Rescuers speculated that the odd behavior was possibly an illness caused by a virus or contaminants washed into the ocean after forest fires in Southern California. Another theory was that unseasonable weather patterns threw off the birds' eating habits, causing them to act disoriented.
	In early 2010, a bitterly cold and snowy winter followed a summer drought, preventing many species in Mongolia from grazing adequately. The disaster, which Mongolians called a zud (this one was particularly devastating, but they are an all too common phenomenon), resulted in the deaths of millions of camels, goats, sheep, cows, yaks and horses. The U.N. even started a program to pay herders to clear the animal carcasses. The deaths were tragic enough, but in a country where much of the population depends on herding livestock, the disaster also threatened the livelihood of the area's humans.
	As the bodies of several species of endangered sea turtles washed up on the shores of El Salvador in January 2006, the circumstances of their deaths appeared mysterious. The Wildlife Conservation Society later said the sea turtles, some 200 of them, were the victims of red tide, toxic algal blooms that had killed before.