By: Anurag Baruah
March 7 2023
False: A video clip shows crows behaving erratically ahead of the Tajikistan earthquake.
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Fact-Check
The Verdict False
The video of the birds is from Mexico and has no connection to the Tajikistan earthquake.
Claim ID 609d170a
Context
On February 23, 2023, a 7.2 magnitude earthquake hit Tajikistan near the Chinese border, with tremors occurring in Kashgar and Artux, in the Xinjiang region of China. Subsequently, many video clips claiming to be related to the disaster went viral.
A short clip showing a flock of crows settling in a residential area and behaving erratically went viral in Assamese after it was featured on the regional news portal TIME8 in a news segment uploaded to Facebook on February 23. TIME8 claimed that this occurred just before the Tajikistan earthquake, and the irregular behavior of the crows was because of the impending earthquake. The same news segment also featured other video clips, including a house with furniture shaking violently, claiming that it showed the Tajikistan earthquake of February 23.
In Fact
We conducted a reverse image search on keyframes of the viral video depicting the crows and found a news report published by the Mexican news website Netnoticias.mx on January 26, 2023. Originally in Spanish, the report included screenshots of the viral video and stated that it showed hundreds of birds perched on houses at a sub-division in Mexico. It also mentioned a TikTok user, @josueresndiz, as the source of the video clip, which we confirmed was uploaded to TikTok on January 23, 2023, corroborating the report.
We took a screenshot of the TikTok video and discovered that the numberplate of a car in the video clip has "Guanajuato" written on it, a city in Mexico, confirming the filming location.
The footage of a house with furniture shaking violently and objects falling to the floor included in the same news segment also has no link to the Tajikistan earthquake. Logically has previously debunked this claim, finding that the visuals show the earthquake that hit Fukushima, Japan, on February 13, 2021.
The Verdict
The video of a flock of birds behaving erratically is from Mexico and was posted on TikTok long before the Tajikistan earthquake occurred. Therefore, we have marked the claim as false.