News

For more than 50 years US radar aeroecology has largely been restricted to the lower 48 states — until now. Just out in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the BirdCast team publishes the first weather surveillance radar studies of Alaskan bird migration.

During the week of April 19-25, several weather events set up excellent conditions for observing visible migration, mostly of wood-warblers, including this Worm-eating Warbler, migrating along Florida’s east coast. Our colleague Jacob Drucker reports on his observations on the ground!

Trans-Gulf migrants are encountering rain as they approach the US coastline. Birders in Texas and in other areas along the Gulf of Mexico cost should make plans to visit the coast … now.

Every year approximately 6.8 million migratory birds collide with communication towers in the United States and Canada. Non-flashing lighting is a primary factor in these collisions. Fortunately, there’s a unique opportunity for communications tower owners and birds to mitigate the hazards that such structures pose.

Tanagers bring the most incredible splashes of color to spring migration across the continent. Check out the movements of three migratory species over the last month.

April’s Super Pink Moon will be visible after sunset and reach peak illumination at 11:33 P.M. EDT on 26 April 2021. For those wishing to see birds migrating at night, if the sky is clear, point a telescope or strong pair of binoculars toward the moon, particularly if you are in a location where the BirdCast model predicts medium to high intensity migration.

An evolving frontal boundary will make for some interesting conditions along the Atlantic Seaboard to transport birds farther afield than they might typically travel in the coming 72 hours.

The spring window for peak bird migration in Texas has arrived, so it’s time to get outside and experience the coming spectacle! Just doing one simple thing will help protect these migrating birds: turn off all non-essential lights between 11pm and 6am every night to go Lights Out and reduce collision risk!

Continuing frontal boundaries and associated unstable weather conditions in the Gulf of Mexico are going to make for some interesting migration patterns in the coming week.

The GloBAM research consortium published a letter in Science with a call for European national meteorological agencies to provide biological and meteorological data from its radars.

In the early morning hours of 9 April 2021, La Soufrière in St Vincent erupted and has continued to do so in dramatic and disastrous fashion in the days since the first explosion. The ash plume from these eruptions now spans a wide swath of the globe from the Caribbean to the western Mediterranean. Birds migrating through this plume may experience hazardous conditions, so observers in areas where concentrations of sulfur dioxide and other volcanic emissions are high should monitor birds’ behaviors and physical conditions for potential signs of impacts.

The BirdCast team has unveiled a new feature on our maps! Forecast and live migration maps now indicate the total number of birds in flight above the contiguous United States.