News

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.

BirdCast will monitor ‘live’ the behavior of birds and insects during the total eclipse today. BirdCast’s ‘live migration maps’ will be enabled all day, and we have tuned the sensitivity to display the day-time activity of birds and insects combined. The eclipse display, the thumbnail you see to the right, will be active from 1pm to 5pm today.

With the total solar eclipse of 8 April 2024 close at hand, we are highlighting a previous BirdCast new item describing behaviors observed during the 21 August 2017 total solar eclipse. See below to review the original post to get reacquainted with some of the behaviors we expect to see and, so, too, to get excited about observing behaviors on 8 April!

The BirdCast team will be reposting two accounts originally written about the August 2017 eclipse. This is the first of these posts, detailing reports of animal behaviors, which we hope will get you excited about observing animal behaviors on 8 April 2024!

The BirdCast team is reposting two accounts originally written about the August 2017 eclipse. This is the second of these posts, detailing results from our 2018 publication using radar to study biological activity in the air during the eclipse … with radar!

We will keep this simple – welcome to the billion bird club!
There is not much more that we can say beyond – in the recorded history of BirdCast, here is the first billion bird night! BILLION! And, as you can see, this epic and grand occasion did not stop at a billion, growing to nearly 1.2 billion!

Migration intensity goes off the charts – the BILLION bird barrier is shattered!

The past week saw another movement above the half a billion mark, with continued high intensity flights predicted for 16-17 October. Let’s get those lights out, especially in the areas with red alerts.

In recent days we’ve hit the highest highs and lowest lows of this migration season. Here, we speak briefly about the last week’s events and highlight the upcoming movements and action alerts for the next three days.

The remnants of Philippe, a long lived hurricane, tropical storm and depression, and post tropical cyclone, are coming ashore in northern New England and the Canadian Maritimes.

Our colleagues and friends in the Chicago, Illinois area have sad news about a major bird collision event that occurred last night and this morning, 4-5 October 2023. Reports from the area indicate that large numbers of birds died in collisions while major migration was occurring in the area (see the following checklist, as well as this one). Although details are still emerging, this event appears to be a combination of high intensity migration, adverse weather conditions for flying, and light and glass – a mix we know too well can be deadly.