Nature's own tornado detector saves migrating birds, study finds
Nature's own tornado detector saves migrating birds, study finds
By GEOFFREY MOHAN
Los Angeles Times
December 18, 2014
LOS ANGELES — Ornithologist Henry Streby was happy enough that a song bird weighing less than two nickels managed to carry a tiny electronic sensor from Tennessee to Colombia and back.
Then he looked at the paths taken by several of the birds.
The data showed that five of his recently returned golden-winged warblers fled their Appalachian Mountain breeding ground and winged back to the Gulf of Mexico a day or two ahead of a massive thunderstorm cell that would later spawn 84 tornadoes and kill at least 35 people.
Streby, a National Science Foundation visiting research scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, thinks the birds may have been reacting to very low-frequency sound waves produced by the distant, approaching storm, according to a study published online Thursday in the journal Current Biology.
"Everybody knows that birds can respond to changes in barometric pressure, wind speed and wind direction, and cloud cover - all the things that come with the front of a storm," said Streby. "But these birds left long before any of those things happened."
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