I've been hiking local trials for the past week and usually spot 10+ different species, but yesterday (7/9) I went out and only saw 2-3. Forest was unusually quiet, so after an hour or so I headed back home (7-8 mile drive). A few minutes from the house a tornado warning for my area came across the radio and weather turned really ugly. I pulled in my driveway about a minute before a 100 year old walnut tree blew over in my front yard. Luckily, no damage to the house, just a big mess. Could the birds have known beforehand bad weather was coming and hunkered down? I'm new to birding, so maybe some days they just aren't out and about IDK.
-
Welcome to BirdForum, the internet's largest birding community with thousands of members from all over the world. The forums are dedicated to wild birds, birding, binoculars and equipment and all that goes with it.
Please register for an account to take part in the discussions in the forum, post your pictures in the gallery and more.
Can birds predict tornados? (2 Viewers)
- Thread starter Tripp
- Start date
Ofthewoods
Well-known member
They call the Ibis hurricane birds, last to leave first to return...
Evan Atkinson
Always finding a way to go off topic...
This was something that always crossed my mind. How tornadoes affect reproducibility of breeding birds, do they breed later in spring when there is less chance of severe weather? Or do they move to areas where there is not any bad weather because they can sense that there is going to be a storm?
Evan
Evan
Absolutely yes, all the animals seems to know what's going to happen. I've got a german shepherd that is afraid of thunder - she will know first thing in the morning after waking that storms are going to hit later that afternoon.....6-7 hours later.
Last winter the local bird store reported that birds were massing on their feeders 1-2 days before a record-setting cold air mass moved in, and similarly this winter before big ocean storms hit. It wasn't just them, they had reports coming in from customers all around the area of this happening with their feeders.
I've actually started to wonder if wild creatures are sensing air movements and changing pressure or if there's something else happening, like an ability to sense a short time into the future based on some ability that we humans have either lost or disregard now. Remember the elephants that ran up the hill with tourists on their backs in the south pacific shortly before the massive tsunami hit in 2004.
Are the animals seismologists and meteorologists? Or do they have some extrasensory ability that we humans have lost, perhaps because our minds have shifted focus to the spoken word and the thousands of words of vocabulary we have in our heads?
Last winter the local bird store reported that birds were massing on their feeders 1-2 days before a record-setting cold air mass moved in, and similarly this winter before big ocean storms hit. It wasn't just them, they had reports coming in from customers all around the area of this happening with their feeders.
I've actually started to wonder if wild creatures are sensing air movements and changing pressure or if there's something else happening, like an ability to sense a short time into the future based on some ability that we humans have either lost or disregard now. Remember the elephants that ran up the hill with tourists on their backs in the south pacific shortly before the massive tsunami hit in 2004.
Are the animals seismologists and meteorologists? Or do they have some extrasensory ability that we humans have lost, perhaps because our minds have shifted focus to the spoken word and the thousands of words of vocabulary we have in our heads?
