News

An exciting migration event unfolded yesterday morning and this morning in Southern California, as many thousands of birds continued their nocturnal movements well into the first hours of day light.

A brief migration update – another frontal boundary has started to move into the Gulf of Mexico region , and there are a number of interesting events to share this evening with its passage.

Over the coming weeks, our excitement about arriving migrants in the Gulf of Mexico region from Central and South America and the Caribbean will build to fever-pitch! Some of these migrants will arrive after significant over water flights, which we generally call trans-Gulf migration. We will speak of it often, to be sure! And though the peak of these movements is more than one month from now, even in mid March some inbound trans-Gulf bird migration is occurring over the western Gulf of Mexico.

Southern California affords some excellent opportunities to see continuing diurnal migration of typically nocturnal migrants. Kicking off in Spring 2021, the Bear Divide Migration Count by the Moore Lab of Zoology at Occidental College is one of these opportunities!

We’ve created a new tool to update us as species advance through their arrivals in each region, using data from eBird. We assign each species to four possible categories: Not Yet Arrived, Arrival Beginning, Approaching Peak, or Peaking. Then, we…

Each night, from local sunset to local sunrise in the Eastern time zone, a BirdCast server downloads radar data from 16 stations in the northeastern US. These data are composed of every scan of the atmosphere made by these radars during this time period, with a particular focus in our case on radar reflectivity products representing the magnitude of targets (whether meteorological, like rain and hail, or biological, like birds, bats, and insects) at a given radar. A pipeline of algorithms extracts information from these radar data about birds, and the resulting bird-specific summary imagery is published daily in early afternoon eastern time (give or take).

This update focuses on the migration activity in the West where several nights of significant movements were apparent recently.

Team BirdCast would like to highlight one of the more unfortunate aspects of the study of nocturnal bird migration. Bird mortality at and near areas of strong artificial illumination has been well documented at numerous locations around the world with the spread of electricity…

We posted previously on the exceptional movements of Franklin’s Gulls and Cave Swallows that occurred around 13 November 2015. The first post set the stage for how these species appeared so far out of range, and we follow with this…

November 13 saw an epic Franklin’s Gull and Cave Swallow flight to the East Coast of the United States, the likes of which have not been previously recorded. Here, we describe in the first of a three part series how and why this unprecedented event occurred.

23 May 2020 on the eastern shore of Virginia brought some migration magic to a small habitat patch for some lucky observers. Just over 200 migrants in a 10-acre patch. Our friend Ned Brinkley describes the action and puts it in proper perspective.

Team BirdCast has been analyzing radar data with our group of talented collaborators, and today we published a new study on shifting patterns of nocturnal bird migration and how dynamic these patterns can be spatially.