News

Numerous articles linked and referenced the BirdCast website during the extensive media coverage of Hurricane Sandy. The following is a list of links to radio, print, and Internet coverage of the storm relevant to (or referencing) BirdCast.

Discovery.com – EXCELLENT IDEA…

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…

With dawn’s arrival today Team BirdCast officially closed the books on another migration season of forecasting where, when, and how many birds will migrate over the contiguous US. Team BirdCast thanks all of you who spent time perusing our forecasts, pondering our interpretations, and (hopefully) ground-truthing our speculations!

Thankfully, Tropical and Post Tropical Storm Andrea was neither an epic nor devastating storm. It moved rapidly from the Gulf Coast off the coast of New England, bringing heavy rains primarily, and its speed and eventual path made it mostly…

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…

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…

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.

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. This…

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.

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.

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…