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Feathered Forecasters? Tiny Birds Knew Killer Tornadoes Were Coming
A male golden-winged warbler
A new study of migrating birds adds to signs that animals may make better meteorologists than humans do.
The latest evidence: A flock of birds flew away from its nesting site days before there were any signs of danger and well before forecasters predicted the arrival of a massive storm system that spawned 84 confirmed tornadoes and killed at least 35 people, researchers reported Thursday in Current Biology.
"Meteorologists were predicting that the storm might come our way," says the study's lead author, Henry Streby, a National Science Foundation postdoctoral research fellow and visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. "But by the time they were saying they were sure it was coming, the birds had already figured it out and were gone."
The golden-winged warblers normally spend winters in South America and fly up to Tennessee to nest, Streby says. They had been at their nesting site for just a couple of days before they turned around and headed south again.
The discovery was completely fortuitous. Researchers had been testing to see if a new kind of geolocator could be carried by the tiny birds. The geolocators fit like little backpacks on the birds' backs with harnesses attached around their legs.
The geolocators were a success and stayed on the warblers for a year, recording everywhere the birds went. When the researchers recaptured the birds and analyzed the location data they were stunned to discover that the warblers had taken off from their breeding grounds in the Cumberland Mountains of eastern Tennessee, where they had only just arrived, for an unplanned migration south taking them out of the path of the oncoming storm. All told, the warblers travelled 1,500 kilometers (932 miles) in five days to steer clear of the tornado-producing system.
Streby suspects that the birds were alerted by low-frequency sound waves sparked by the tornadic storm. Those waves would be right in the range birds can pick up, but undetectable by human ears.
"They might be able to hear the storms coming and make a decision to leave and come back rather than hunker down and try to survive the tornadoes," he says.
Other: http://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment...-coming-n270381
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Feathered Forecasters? Tiny Birds Knew Killer Tornadoes Were Coming |
