Migrating Through Hurricanes Listen in RealAudio Email Your Comments

Dave Thurlow, Host

 
Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow for The Weather Notebook. Today we have a bit of my conversation with Scott Weidensaul, author and devoted bird watcher. He spoke to us from his home near Hawk Mountain in Pennsylvania about bird migration and hurricanes.

Principal Migration Routes - USGS

DT: "So, this is the heart of hurricane season and in fact Hurricane Floyd is racing up the east coast as we speak. I was wondering if, for the birds that migrate along the Atlantic seaboard if they might be affected somewhat by the hurricanes this time of year."

SW: "Sure and that's a big problem for these birds because some of these songbirds are literally taking off from the coast of the Canadian maritimes and the northeastern US and flying out over the western Atlantic on a non-stop flight that ordinarily would take them all the way to the northeastern coast of South America. That's 80 or 90 hours of non-stop flight. And they have no way of knowing when they take off from Nova Scotia or Maine that there's a category 4 storm swirling around in the western Atlantic. There's also a kind of a reverse effect to that. As these hurricanes move up along the eastern coast, they pull sea birds in from far out to sea and dump them at times, hundreds of miles inland."

DT: "Do they get caught up in the eye and just can't find their way out?"

SW: "That appears to be the case and in fact, birders have recently started going out in the middle of hurricanes as the remnants of these hurricanes are passing up through the eastern states and checking large bodies of water, rivers, lakes, reservoirs, things like that, and they're finding all these sea birds that are normally found out near the edge of the continental shelf that have been pulled in and very often then, as soon as the storm passes, these birds instinctively know which way to go and end up heading back out to the ocean again. If you're not out there in the worst of the weather, you're not going to see them."

Please be sure to check out Scott Weidensaul's wonderful new book called "Living on the Wind." Our show is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory.

 

Living on the Wind - "Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds" Scott Weidensaul is the author of Mountains of the Heart: A Natural History of the Appalachians and other books. A columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, he is also a federally licensed bird bander in the Pennsylvania Appalachians, where he lives. Read an excerpt.