BirdCast Email Migration Alerts now available in 216 cities

We are excited to announce that BirdCast Migration Email Alerts are now available in all states of the contiguous United States! You can subscribe to receive email notifications when our forecast model predicts that migration will be high the next day—that is, when we anticipate a migration night ranking in the top 10% of nights for the current migration season.

Even if your town or city is not available as an alert location, these email alerts can still be useful. In that case, we recommend signing up for alerts from the city closest to where you live. Large waves of migration are often widespread, so alerts from cities within roughly 100 miles of your location tend to be representative for your area in most cases.

For this reason, we also suggest subscribing only to the city nearest to you. Subscribing to multiple cities within the same state or region may result in receiving duplicate emails for the same large-scale migration events.

To maximize coverage, we selected cities so that anyone in the contiguous United States can choose one relatively close to them. Cities were chosen based on the population size of their larger metropolitan area (using the populated places dataset from Natural Earth) as well as additional criteria to ensure an even distribution across the country. As a result, the cities selected for each state are not necessarily its largest.

On our Subscribe page for email alerts, you’ll notice alerts are available in five distinct regions: the Northeast, Midwest, Southeast, Southwest, and West. You will need to manage city subscriptions for these regions separately. You can unsubscribe at any time using the link found at the bottom of the alert emails. Please note that if you subscribe to more than one region, you will need to unsubscribe from each individually.

We hope you enjoy this expanded feature on BirdCast!