Photograph of northern lapwing off course in Massachusetts: Ian Davies
Birds deal with hurricanes better than you might think.
Some get blown off course, but they adapt. Today’s Boston Globe has a story by Peter Schworm and Melissa M. Werthmann on northern lapwings that Hurricane Sandy detoured from their Scandinavia-to-African migration route. The lapwings are now delighting birdwatchers on Cape Cod, Nantucket, and in Middleborough. Read more here.
And Natalie Angier writes at the NY Times, “Biologists studying the hurricane’s aftermath say there is remarkably little evidence that birds … have suffered the sort of mass casualties seen in environmental disasters like the BP oil spill of 2010, when thousands of oil-slicked seabirds washed ashore, unable to fly, feed or stay warm.
“ ‘With an oil spill, the mortality is way more direct and evident,’ said Andrew Farnsworth, a scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. …
“To the contrary, scientists said, powerful new satellite tracking studies of birds on the wing — including one that coincided with the height of Hurricane Sandy’s fury — reveal birds as the supreme masters of extreme weather management, able to skirt deftly around gale-force winds, correct course after being blown horribly astray, or even use a hurricane as a kind of slingshot to propel themselves forward at hyperspeed. …
“In preparation for a possible offshore wind development project, Caleb Spiegel, a wildlife biologist with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, and his colleagues at the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management have attached transmitters to the tail feathers of several types of migratory birds, including the northern gannet, a big waterfowl with a spectacular fishing style of falling straight down from the sky like a missile dropped from a plane.
“As it happened, one of the gannets was approaching the southern shore of New Jersey at just the moment Hurricane Sandy made landfall there, and Mr. Spiegel could catch the bird’s honker of a reaction. Making a sharp U-turn, it headed back north toward Long Island and then cut out to sea along the continental shelf, where it waited out the storm while refueling with a few divebombs for fish.
“ ‘The bird has since returned to New Jersey,’ Mr. Spiegel said. ‘It’s pretty much back where it started.’ ” More here.
Photograph: NY Times
A protected area for plovers in Lido Beach, N.Y., after a 2009 storm.
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