Too much of anything can be a problem…

… Too much water in the wrong place at the wrong time is a flood. And too many birds in the wrong place can be a problem as well.

This week’s Challenge highlights a couple of wrong-place & too-many times when people went to work to fix the problem, but it completely and utterly failed. These aren’t hard, but are pretty amazing in their details. Can you figure out what’s going on in each of these Challenges?

1. Too many birds really can be a problem. In one famous incident, and entire “War” was declared on a particular kind of bird. Big guns were brought out, the campaign planned, thousands of shots were fired, and it all ended in a dismal failure. Where was this war? What kind of birds were being fought? And in the end, what happened?

2. Too many insects can be a problem as well, especially when then fly around en masse. Can you find the largest grouping of insects that caused enormous problems with the local agriculture? Why do those insects group together? And why do those groupings finally end?

These Challenges can take you far into some fascinating rabbit holes (another kind of pest in some locations), but keep your wits about you and let us know how you answered these Challenges.

As always, we’re interested in how you found the solutions to these Challenge questions. Let us know in the comments.

Search on!