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Scientists Discover an Animal at Can

Sense When a Tornado Will Strike
Tiny golden-winged warblers detect infrasound that heralds the coming of massive storms so
they can y out of harm's way.
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(Photo: Willoughby Owen/Getty Images)

December 18, 2014

By Katharine Gammon

Katharine Gammon has written for Nature, Wired , Discover, and Popular Science. A new mom,
she lives in Santa Monica.
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hen the forest suddenly gets quiet and birds take ight, it might be time to worry about a brewing
storm. New research published Wednesday shows that tiny birds sensed a giant storm
developing in late April 2014a weather event that spawned 84 tornadoes, killing 35 people.
The scientists stumbled on the nding when they were studying golden-winged warblerssmall birds that
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weigh less than a third of an ounce. Henry Streby, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California,
Berkeley, said that the team was testing if the birds could carry tiny backpack transmitters.
The warblers are the smallest species ever tracked, and when the researchers retrieved the transmitters
from ve birds, they discovered something strange: The birds had all moved away from their breeding
grounds a day before the storm, ying nearly 1,000 mileseven though the tornado was still hundreds of
miles away.
The week prior, every bird was in the place we expected, but then something happened, said Streby. We of
course assumed we had done something wrong in analyzing the data, so we spent a while editing that out
before we came to the conclusion that the birds were getting away from the storm.
The researchers think that the birds were sensing infrasoundacoustic waves that occur at frequencies
below 20 hertz. While humans cant hear such a low level of sound, its known that birds and other animals
can.
Streby stressed that the researchers are only looking at correlationsbut its a strong correlation. All signs
point toward infrasound, and we know that this kind of sound affects birds from previous research, he said.
The teams ndings were published in the journal Current Biology.
So is it time to re the meteorologists and start looking to the sky for storm predictions?

Loading

See more actions

Not quite yet.

Birds are really good at predicting storms, but theyre not a good replacement for satellites and radar, and a
meteorologist is usually going to be better than the birds, Streby said.
He noted that a storm already has to be forming nearby before the birds can sense the infrasound, whereas
humans reading satellite data can discern where storms are developing thousands of miles away.
There is one situation, though, where Streby said that birds could beat humans: If you were all alone in the
forest and all the birds left, you should be worried about it.
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When storms force birds to ee, it can put pressure on their ability to breed. As storms become more
powerful and frequent with climate change, those disruptions will grow.
related

is Technology Can Warn of Catastrophic Flooding Months in Advance

They wouldnt do this with a normal thunderstorm, but if it comes to big storms arriving every year and birds
losing four to ve days of breeding season, it would be a big problem for their conservation, said Streby.
Golden-winged warblers have suffered one of the steepest population drops of any songbird species in the
past 45 years, according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Conservationists are working on a plan to stop
the decline and grow the population 50 percent by 2050.
Streby is continuing his research and plans to put backpacks on 500 golden-winged warblers and related
species that range from North Carolina to Manitoba, Canada. The goal, he says, is to connect data on the
places the birds breed with the places they avoid during the winter to coordinate conservation efforts. But
hes open to more serendipitous discoveries along the way.

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