![]() ![]() When researchers dropped the barometric pressure to simulate an approaching winter storm, the birds skipped their morning routine and went straight to packing in the seeds – something I’ve been watching at my feeders since yesterday. When a bird wakes up, it generally preens its feathers and gets a handle on the day (caw-fee, anyone?) before eating breakfast. These birds will eat you out of house and home! Photo credit Ryan Brady.Ī study conducted by Western University’s Advanced Facility for avian research found that changes in barometric pressure helped birds make decisions about everything from flight to feeding. This allows them to maintain elevation even when the ground isn’t visible – think of foggy days, night migrations, or flight above the clouds – and detect declining barometric pressures that signal approaching storm fronts. My ears popped: barometric weather detectionīirds have a special middle-ear receptor called the Vitali organ that senses changes in barometric pressure. Perhaps storm-generated infrasound let the warblers know it was time to leave. The infrasound produced by surf, tides, and wind helps guide birds on migration. Yet when they checked weather records, none of these factors fluctuated significantly prior to the storm. ![]() Researchers initially reasoned that subtle changes in weather-atmospheric pressure, temperature, wind speed, cloud cover, or rainfall-signaled the impending disaster. They returned to their mountain breeding grounds once the storm system passed. The warblers – tiny little birds! – traveled over 1500 kilometers in five days to avoid the deadly storms, flying south to the Florida coast days before human forecasters issued their first warnings. In 2014, five radio-tagged Golden-winged Warblers undertook an evacuation migration from eastern Tennessee two days before a massive storm system spawned 84 tornadoes and killed 35 people across the southeastern United States. We use sophisticated sensors and powerful computers to predict storms and detect tornados several minutes before they touch down, but birds have us beat when it comes to short-term storm detection. To learn more about how and for what purposes Amazon uses personal information (such as Amazon Store order history), please visit our Privacy Notice.Golden-winged Warbler. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie Preferences, as described in the Cookie Notice. ![]() Click ‘Customise Cookies’ to decline these cookies, make more detailed choices, or learn more. Third parties use cookies for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalised ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. This includes using first- and third-party cookies, which store or access standard device information such as a unique identifier. If you agree, we’ll also use cookies to complement your shopping experience across the Amazon stores as described in our Cookie Notice. We also use these cookies to understand how customers use our services (for example, by measuring site visits) so we can make improvements. We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie Notice. ![]()
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