News

System uses BirdCast data to enable real-time lighting adjustments during peak migration events and reduce the number of birds colliding with buildings

We said BILLION twice before in BirdCast history, on 6 October 2023 and on 25 September 2025! Amazing! Welcome back to the billion bird night club! Again! For the third time! 8 October 2025! The third epic night did not stop at a billion either: no, it grew beyond that, and beyond 1.1 billion, beyond 1.2 billion, all the way to 1.25 billion, becoming the biggest night of migration yet recorded by BirdCast!

BirdCast presented at the annual Migration Celebration at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology on September 13. Celebrating the spectacle of bird migration, visitors could learn how to use BirdCast’s Migration Tools, participate in the BirdCast quiz bowl, and learn more about how to stop bird collisions at the table of the Bird Collision Prevention Alliance, a new partnership that BirdCast participates in.

Hurricane Milton is a powerful and very dangerous storm. Birds have been reported traveling in its eye, and as the storm approaches landfall, bioscattered is visible in proximity to the eye of the storm.

Hurricane Helene is a dangerous storm predicted to make landfall on Thursday afternoon eastern time in the Florida Panhandle. Its circulation will entrain pelagic birds, displace nearshore species, and down overland migrants in many areas of the southeast and probably as far north as Tennessee and maybe even Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. We are following the progress of the storm and posting observations here.

Keep your eyes open for Northern Wheatear in northeastern North American in the coming days – go birding and help make us look good by documenting this species! Time of year and prevailing weather appear to be aligning to warrant us donning our prediction hats!

As a reminder to what the team is working on here at BirdCast, we return to a previous post we wrote. With spring soon arriving and preparations for migration underway, here is a primer on what we do. We turn weather radar data into information on the numbers and flight directions of birds aloft in order to expand the understanding of migratory bird movement. After several years (and hundreds of posts) describing migration, species on the move, and unique migration events, we want you to have a better understanding of what happens at BirdCast. Here is a brief overview and a behind-the-scenes look at the ways we apply radar data to study bird migration.

Francine made landfall in Louisiana, now making its way north along the lower Mississippi River valley. Its circulation has entrained some pelagic birds, displaced some nearshore species, and downed overland migrants.

Debby arrived to Florida, meandered its way into the Carolina Bight, made landfall in the Carolinas, and is now rapidly speeding toward the northeastern portions of the continent. This storm, though not powerful in terms of winds, has produced large amounts of precipitation in its path and its wake. It’s also entrained some pelagic birds, displaced some nearshore species, and downed overland migrants.

In August of 2017, millions peered through protective eyewear at the solar eclipse—the first total eclipse visible in the continental United States in nearly 40 years. During the event, researchers from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the University of Oxford watched radar to observe the behavior of birds and insects. Their findings have been published in Biology Letters.

Spring migration is in full swing, and knowing when peak migration will occur in your area is valuable information! Here we provide a sortable table of peak periods of spring bird migration for the largest cities by human population size in the contiguous US.

Follow the celestially-driven, aeroecological events of today’s total solar eclipse as detected by the weather surveillance radar network operating in the contiguous US! BirdCast will, again, monitor aerial animal behaviors during today’s eclipse from the perspective of what is happening to the numbers of animals above the contiguous US.