evidence: The origin of this claim is as head-spinning as it is instructive, so let's untangle the knot: Does 5G really kill birds, and if not, why are so many people shouting about it online? The first part of this saga is fairly straightforward: No, 5G—the fifth generation of our mobile cellular network—does not kill birds. "Radio wave emissions above 10 MHz from radio transmission antennas (including cell telephone towers) are not known to harm birds," says Joe Kirschvink, a biophysicist at the California Institute of Technology who specializes in magnetics, in an email. [...] The "5G kills birds" phenomenon was started by John Kuhles, who according to the fact-checking site Snopes, "runs several anti-5G conspiracy websites and social media pages." In a Facebook post last year, Kuhles claimed that a recent mass die-off of European Starlings in the Netherlands was caused by a 5G antenna test. Despite the fact that the local municipality never named a cause for the die-off, and the fact that the test Kuhles cites happened months before the die-off occurred, other Facebook pages and health blogs nonetheless picked up the post.