News

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.

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.