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Birds Fled Area Before Tornadoes Appeared
SternisheFan sends a report from scientists who were tracking a group of birds — golden-winged warblers — in the Appalachian mountains. Just a few days after the birds completed their seasonal migration, they did something odd — they picked up and moved again. Shortly thereafter, a series of storms swept through that area of the U.S., which led to a destructive tornado outbreak (abstract).
After the storm had blown over, the team recaptured five of the warblers and removed the geolocators. These are tiny devices weighing about half a gram, which measure light levels. Based on the timing and length of the days they record, these gadgets allow scientists to calculate and track the approximate location of migratory birds. In this case, all five indicated that the birds had taken unprecedented evasive action, beginning one to two days ahead of the storm's arrival. "The warblers in our study flew at least 1,500km (932 miles) in total," Dr. Streby said. They escaped just south of the tornadoes' path — and then went straight home again. By 2 May, all five were back in their nesting area."
...what ruffled THEIR feathers?
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Wow, someone just now noticed that animals can easily detect incoming low pressure fronts and hide from the weather.
Guess what, humans are essentially the only ones who can't tell when bad weather is coming. Ask anyone who spends some time in nature rather than hiding in some office or school room.
Fish, cows, horses, dogs, cats, squirrels, birds, pretty much anything you can think of takes cover well before a storm, except us.
The warblers weren't running form 'tornados' they were running from low pressure gradients moving in rapidly.
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"We evacuated ourselves to the waffle house"...entertaining reading for once.
Taco could see what was coming and fled...
It has long been reported that animals act odd before earthquakes, I had never heard about before tornado's. Animals do seem to have some "6th sense" that we just don't understand.
I had an idea over ten years ago, that I hoped could save lives and make me money, but I'll never do anything with it, so here it is:
One animal acting strange (as in before an earth quake or whatever) is nothing, but a large number of animals in a specific area, could very possibly be a warning of impending danger. If there was a (well known) web site that you could report your animal acting "weird", or out of the ordinary to, you would have random reports from all over the place, but if you mapped results in real time and saw a lot of activity in a specific area, that could be an early warning. I don't see why it wouldn't work, assuming the "animals act weird before events" theory is correct.
Anyway, if this works and saves lives, remember you heard it here first.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
So to prevent tornados... all we actually need are a bunch of bird cages?
This sort of thing makes me chuckle, I grew up around a forest (and a jungle too) and we could always tell when people (or predators) were coming into our area.
The birds went silent or made their warning calls, the thing is you kind of learned those sounds (or lack of) subconsciously.
As we got older we made the connection, but as kids when the birds went silent so did we, listening for what it was they heard or saw.
There were a variety of other indicators for things like seasonal changes (ant nest activity etc) and we learned these things for our areas as well.
So it's no surprise to anyone living near by or in the woods that animals can do this, that is if they pay attention.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
1. The birds left days before, so could not possibly have sensed the tornadoes themselves, which had not yet formed. They might have noticed bad weather coming, but the assertion in the story is much stronger than that.
2. There's no mention of a baseline: this appears to have been the first time they used these methods, so there's no way to know this wasn't within the scope of normal behavior and/or a mistake in their interpretation of the data.
Without more information this appears to be either really bad reporting or really bad research or both.
According to the Additive Noise Model, the birds didn't avoid the storm. They caused it.
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All those flapping wings caused the tornadoes.
Maybe birds are just super skittish and just run off whenever any weather event is on the way?
X
... there are humans that are not even that smart....
the cool thing about light meters is that they can double as mini solar panels. or rather you can use a solar panel to measure sunlight (go figure), and therefore latitude and with a good RTC longitude.
No shyt?
Birds understand atmospheric pressure changes, they have a biological sensory organ that allows them to "feel" barometric pressure. This was discovered like 70 years ago? Why is it that when someone figures out something they think they are the first and it gets noticed boarded on the front page. /. has really started to go down hill.
Oh did you know sand keeps your skin soft, we should post about that!
Must have been bird Twitter.
I was out mowing the lawn at my parents' place one day on a Wednesday afternoon in late July of that year, and the strangest thing happened to me that I had absolutely no explanation for at the time. I cannot describe the sensation any other way than to say that I was suddenly afraid of the sky. The weather seemed entirely fine by all appearances, with only a smattering of clouds in the sky, but all I wanted to do was just abandon the lawn mower right where it was and get inside. Of course, intellectually I knew it was absurd to be afraid of the sky, and I pushed aside the feelings and finished my task, but it was still the strangest sensation I think I had ever felt, and if mowing the lawn had required more concentration, I probably would not have been able to finish it on account of being so distracted
Some 48 hours later or so, the largest tornado that had ever been seen in that area until that time ripped through the city, killing more than 2 dozen people, destroying several hundred homes, and doing hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. I remember when I was taking the bus the next day to where I worked at the time, I went by one of the areas where the tornado had touched down and the devastation was unlike anything I had ever seen in my life prior to that point.
I often wondered since that event, however, if what I was interpreting as being "afraid of the sky" only a couple of days before was some sort of survival instinct that was trying to kick in... to get me out of harms way, even though I did not know exactly what that harm was. Certainly it would be no surprise to me at all if many animals might happen to possess something similar, and lacking the intellectual reasoning of a human who could discard such a sensation on a rational basis, as I did at the time, would instead surrender their actions to doing whatever those feelings are telling them to do, and get the bloody hell out of the area.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
This has been common knowledge for years, I was taught growing up to pay attention to the animals while in the wild... how is this even news????
...would have stayed in the nest, screaming that their friends' data was flawed and that the simulations needed to be improved before taking flight.
Those denier birds stayed put while the rest left. When the rest came back, they divvied up the denier birds' seeds.
~Why do birds suddenly flee in fear
Every time tornadoes appear?~
Big surprise- creatures evolving to survive in their natural environment. Why isn't everything as stupid as a human being?
Duh!