Birds of all feathers ride out storms

Last week we spent time with a bird who may have lost its way: a wayward homing pigeon who has made my patio its new home.

It turns out that being a displaced bird is kind of having a moment these past couple of weeks. The stunning one-two punch of Hurricanes Helene and Milton has taken hundreds of lives and disrupted millions. And of course natural disasters of this magnitude have immense impacts on birds and wildlife.

Readers might remember the vagrant American flamingos who visited Wisconsin last year after Hurricane Idalia blew them off course. They moved on from the state some time last October; since they appeared to be following waterways, the odds are pretty good that they made it back home. Less dramatically showy aquatic birds can also get caught up in these events, especially the ones that spend most of their time in the air.

Magnificent frigatebirds are well-known for flying out ahead of storms before they hit, but they can also get caught up in the eye of ferocious hurricanes. The calm of this small zone protects them, but it means they have to follow the course of the storm inland. When the storm breaks apart, they end up where they can’t find the food and habitat they need.

Another species that gets trapped is the sooty tern. These beautiful birds often spend months up in the air, so a hurricane can scoop them up like a net. Hurricane Helene deposited two sooty terns at Lake Monroe in Indiana, a state that did not escape the wrath of Helene’s destructive winds. In fact, it was birders who specifically were out looking for seabirds blown off course by hurricanes who made this amazing find.

The latter part of hurricane season coincides with the fall migration of billions of passerines in North America. And unfortunately, these hurricanes often originate in or impact the areas in the Gulf and Carribean where these birds spend the winter. When Hurricane Irma denuded the tiny island of Barbuda in 2017, birds that survived the storm or migrated there afterward were unable to find food as there was almost no foliage left to support insect life or allow for forage for herbivorous birds.

One horrifying aspect of Milton was the appearance of dozens of dead birds falling from the sky onto the deck of a Carnival cruise ship that was anchored at sea waiting out the storm. It’s possible they were thrown off their migratory route due to the storm and became exhausted.

Loyal readers know how much I geek out over the BirdCast real time migration radar maps. The maps from September 20 show most of the eastern third of the U.S. completely covered in migrating birds. The September 26 shot, taken as Helene was saturating a huge swath of the country, shows the entire eastern third as completely black — that is, bare of any birds.

The fact is that birds have evolved alongside hurricanes and have the tools to adapt to the storms that occasionally intersect with their migratory paths, and they usually rebound from these events. This will become more difficult as the storms are becoming stronger and larger, and as coastal habitat disappears thanks to both human development and rising sea levels.

Finally, a nod to those critters who don’t need Jim Cantore to show up in their town to know that stuff is about to get real. A few hours prior to Milton’s landfall, a number of Florida residents witnessed and recorded groups of sandhill cranes gathering together in streets and parking lots, walking around squawking and bugling. Naturally, the cranes soon became social media stars. Cranes generally call in groups, and can be heard at least two miles away making it easy for family groups to communicate with one another.

The general sentiment among local humans seems to be that the birds were sounding an alarm. One X user (and I think it should still be called Twitter, but that’s another entire column) said “Even the birds are warning us to evacuate!” Whether or not this is the case, aberrant animal behavior ahead of major storms does happen, and they may have been calling to one another that it was time to get out of Dodge. I hope these cranes made it through the storm and that their compatriots from our area didn’t get caught up in it.