News

Although we are still quite early in the season to discuss the potential for a “slingshot” event that might cause typically southern spring migrants to overshoot their intended destinations along the Atlantic Coast, and although these events are relatively rare…

Several weeks ago, Team BirdCast highlighted a set of conditions for spring overshoot migrants, or “slingshot” migrants, to occur substantially farther north of their intended and seasonally appropriate destinations. We see potential for such conditions over the coming 24-48 hours,…

Last week, Team BirdCast forecast that conditions looked favorable for spring overshoot migrants to occur in areas far to the north of their expected seasonal range. Here, we provide some additional discussion and speculation for what actually transpired. After a frontal…

A tropical system is building in the Gulf of Mexico, forecast to intensify in the coming days and then move ashore in central or southern Texas. Whether this system intensifies to hurricane strength or continues as a tropical storm or depression, it is likely to bring an array of seabirds ashore in southern and central Texas and possibly northern Mexico.

With the departure to the Northeast of Hurricane and Post-Tropical Cyclone Sandy, westerly flow prevails outside the Northeastern US across a huge portion of the Eastern US from the western Great Lakes through peninsular Florida. In many areas, despite the…

High intensity migration and evolving tropical systems are on deck for this week. We estimate movements 400-500 million birds on each of the coming nights over the continental US. Plus, a very active Atlantic Ocean Basin has a number of tropical systems of the move, entraining and displacing a diversity of birds in the Gulf of Mexico region and Bermuda.

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.

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.

Storm! There has been much discussion of the remains of Super Typhoon Nuri as it rips up the Pacific. The remnants of the storm gathered some serious strength and bombed to an anomalously low central pressure in the low 920s….

When birders in Cape May awoke on Monday morning, an interesting pattern was emerging (interesting is the norm in Cape May!). Numerous observers reported that numbers of migrants had arrived during and after the night and were still coming ashore from the Atlantic Ocean. The first real pulse of arrivals of this spring for a number of species had clearly occurred in Cape May. The combination of on the ground reports from eBird, nightly northeastern US radar data processing with BirdCast algorithms, and the excitement of spring arrivals inspired Team BirdCast to look a bit more closely at the events leading up to this movement.

With warm air prevailing across the region, sky watchers should plan to spend a little time looking for Swallow-tailed Kites. April is traditionally a good month to find a wandering individual or two of this southern species in locations far…

Team BirdCast has been experimenting with ways to detect changes in bird distributions as they are occurring. With the help of two talented Cornell undergraduates, Alex Wiebe and Benjamin Van Doren, who are leading the charge, we introduce the BirdCast…