From the Autumn 2022 issue of Living Bird magazine. Subscribe now.
During last falls migration season, Georgia took the top prize for most birds with 900 million birds migrating over the Peach State from August 1st to November 15th. But the birdiest night of fall migration peaked in neighboring Alabama, where 33 million birds flew over Baldwin County the evening of October 16the highest nightly total for any county.
These bragging-rights stats come from the new online Migration Dashboard produced by BirdCast, a collaboration among scientists at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Colorado State University, and University of Massachusetts Amherst that uses weather radar and machine learning to track and forecast bird migration. BirdCast has been monitoring nightly bird migration via radar wideness the U.S.A. since 2018, but last spring the program launched the Dashboard tool to provide real-time migration data at the county level.
In recent years, weve been worldly-wise to visualize and forecast the movements of migrating birds on a continent-wide scale, said BirdCast senior researcher Andrew Farnsworth, a research socialize at the Cornell Lab. Thats been fascinating, but now you can moreover get a finger for whats going on in your own neck of the woods.
Migration Dashboard provides realtime analytics well-nigh nocturnal bird migration, such as flight speed, direction, and altitude. In fall 2021, BirdCast indicated that southern states like Alabama and Georgia had the highest volumes of migrating birds, which makes perfect sense to radar ornithologists like Farnsworth and Adriaan Dokter.
Theres unchangingly a tendency for migration to concentrate east of the Gulf [of Mexico], said Dokter, a research socialize at the Cornell Lab and member of the BirdCast team. The reasons, he said, lie in the vital needs of migrating birds: habitat, food, and favorable winds.
Watch Your Nightly Bird Migration in Real Time
In storing as birds move south from their tastefulness grounds, they seek out large swaths of forest to shelter and refuel during their grueling journeys. Dokter noted that the Appalachian Mountainswhich are substantially 1,500 miles of unbroken trees running from Canada to the Deep South is particularly enticing for migrants. The mountains collect birds from wideness the East, funneling them to the ranges southernmost points in Georgia and Alabama.
Large numbers of birds moreover migrate through Midwestern states like Iowa and Missouri. When flying on favorable tailwinds (that is, winds self-glorification out of the north), migrating birds tend to skid eastward due to prevailing west-to-east winds wideness the continent. Again, the birds are pushed toward Georgia and Alabama.
This confluence of bird-migration riverswhere birds flying lanugo the Appalachians meet birds wayfaring over from the Midwestmakes the Southeast a hub for nocturnal bird air traffic.
The highest-volume bird-migration nights are dictated by weather.
Birds love to migrate with good tailwinds, said Dokter. Indeed, the three biggest bird migration nights in fall 2021on Sept. 22, Oct. 3, and Oct. 16were all the result of upper pressure systems that brought unprepossessed weather and favorable tailwinds out of the north. But Dokter theorizes theres a difference in the makeup of species on those three big migration nights.
Its very likely the first peak is increasingly long-distance migrants, he said. Later we see birds that stay in the U.S. to winter. In other words, birds like warblers that migrate all the way to Central and South America depart first, whereas sparrows and kinglets that have less ground to imbricate migrate later.
As for fall 2022, Dokter says the new BirdCast tool adds a new element to birding the fall migration. Im going to sit there with Migration Dashboard, squint around, and let the birds surprise me, he says.
Benjamin Hacks work on this story as a student editorial teammate was made possible by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology Science Communications Fund, with support from Jay Branegan (Cornell 72) and Stefania Pittaluga.
