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."

Comments

6th sense

[Brad1138]

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.

Re:6th sense

[Wycliffe]

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.

Requiring people to report it would probably be too slow. On the other hand, putting trackers on a couple hundred sparrows in
every town and running it into a large neural net and training it based on actual tornados might get some decent results.
It might be possible to create an actual "canary network" that could warn us much sooner in advance than we currently have
for tornados. If the "canary network" actually worked, we could always move to "phase 2" where we tried to match it to
pressure, inaudible sounds, etc... and create an electronic canary which would be easier to manage than live birds but
using live birds until we figured out exactly how they did it wouldn't be too difficult.

Re:So the question is...

[amiga3D]

I remember a story about a guy photographing animals in an area where a Tsunami hit back in 2004. He said he was taking pictures when suddenly all the animals, I think he said they were some kind of antelope, suddenly looked toward the ocean then the entire herd ran away. He was greatly puzzled until a while later when he was hanging onto the top of a tree for his very life. I know if I'm somewhere and suddenly all the animals start hauling ass I'm going to follow them.

Re:So the question is...

[TapeCutter]

so why don't we start listening for it with our warning systems?

That's what I was thinking, also how can a tornado make any type of noise 2 days before it forms? I can understand animals picking up things we can't, deer may hear the rumble of a quake that causes a tsunami, my dog routinely hears thunder 15-20 minutes before I do and looks for a hiding spot, but how the hell does any animal "hear" something that won't exist for another two days?

Having said that the animal kingdom is full of "mysterious knowledge", for example crocodiles in Northern Australia can somehow "calculate" when a king tide will occur, about an hour before the event they gather at a particular ford across a river where the unusually high tide spills over the ford leaving a bonanza of fish stranded on the rocks. Even Attenborough admits he doesn't have a clue how the crocodiles "know" when to gather at the ford.

Re:Great observational skills

[TapeCutter]

[Animals are] FAR more accurate than any weather forecast I've seen.

You see ants moving eggs, maybe it will rain in the next day or two, but how much rain? How much wind? Any hail, tornados? King tide?

You see humans boarding up windows, sandbagging shops, anchoring boats away from the dock, etc, you know a destructive storm is on it's way.

Weather forecasts are pretty accurate to 5 days out even here in Melbourne which (like NYC) is notoriously fickle, but you don't need doppler radar and a supercomputer to match the forecasting skill of ants. With a bit of practice mentally tracking wind direction, looking at clouds and feeling/smelling the (fresh) air will give you a fair idea of tomorrow's weather.

Natural disasters happen to both species, by all reasonable standards humans are much better at predicting severe weather than animals since (at worst) we have the capacity to simultaneously observe many diverse species to make a statistically combined animal/plant forecast. Having said that, even the humble ants will have buried their dead and rebuilt their city in under a week.