Slashdot Mirror
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.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
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
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."
According to the Additive Noise Model, the birds didn't avoid the storm. They caused it.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Maybe birds are just super skittish and just run off whenever any weather event is on the way?
X
It's like the butterfly effect but with birds!
Must have been bird Twitter.
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????
Predict - maybe. I don't think the birds could have prevented the tornadoes if they had tried.
Get with the program: tornados come to places that birds aren't. Force the birds to stay, the tornados can't come to the area. African and European swallows would work equally well for this purpose. It's like magnets... :)
How do you know some butterfly didn't cause the birds to move?
Play Command HQ online