Birds are incredible navigators, capable of traveling thousands of miles to the same location each year. But sometimes they end up in the wrong place at the wrong time — like inside a hurricane.
Last night, as Hurricane Helen made landfall in Florida as a powerful Category 4 storm, radar spotted a mass in the eye of the storm that experts say is likely a bird and possibly even an insect.
Helen was a superstorm as it traveled down the Gulf of Mexico earlier this week. The seabirds likely escaped the storm’s extreme winds — which reached 140 miles per hour — and ended up in the eye, where it is calm. Once inside, they were essentially trapped, unable to break through the heavy gusts of eyewalls. Kyle Horton, a researcher at Colorado State University who studies bird migration, told Vox that when the storm is over, the bird population will likely disappear.
Storms like Helen can blow seabirds inland like petrels, jaegers and frigatebirds. Exhausted, they end up in unfamiliar habitats where they cannot easily find food. “It’s a challenging situation,” said Andrew Farnsworth, a bird migration expert at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “We know that birds die on these things.”
Indeed, frigatebirds—large seabirds with angular wings and a forked tail—was marked by birds The storm churned inland this Friday into central Georgia and even Tennessee
Although significant, it is not uncommon for birds and insects to be trapped inside the eyes of tropical cyclones. research by Matthew van den Broeke, professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Reports dating back to the 19th century – many of which came from ships – documented the phenomenon, can be observed in some cases That air is “filled with thousands of birds and insects.” One report documented an owl inside the storm.
A 2021 studyVan den Broeke analyzed radar from 33 Atlantic hurricanes that hit the US mainland or Puerto Rico between 2011 and 2020. Birds and insects show signs inside the eye of every storm.
Hurricanes like Helen can also significantly affect fall migration, when billions of birds head south before winter. A map of migration from Thursday night, when Helen made landfall, shows millions of birds migrating west of the storm to places like Texas and Louisiana, but few if any passing through Florida.
When the skies clear after the storm, however, the birds resume their migration, Farnsworth said. “After the storm passes, we see this big explosion of birds at night,” he told me.
It’s also important to remember that birds have evolved with these storms over millennia. They can probably detect an impending hurricane by sensing things Changes in atmospheric pressure And they know how to handle storms, such as by orienting their aerodynamic bodies into the wind.
“They’ve adapted to it, they’ve evolved with it,” Farnsworth said. “Yes, the storm is getting more extreme. But birds know how to deal with these things.”
