Weather radar shows birds trapped inside the eye of Hurricane Helene.
Weather radar shows birds trapped inside the eye of Hurricane Helene.
As Helene made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend region, birds were stuck inside its eye, where the wind is calmer. The tropical storm could disrupt fall bird migration.
Birds are incredible navigators, capable of traveling thousands of miles each year to the same location. But sometimes even they end up in the wrong place at the wrong time — like inside a hurricane.
As Hurricane Helene was making landfall in Florida as a powerful Category 4 storm, radar spotted a mass in the eye of the storm that experts say is likely birds and perhaps also insects.
Seabirds likely fled the storm’s extreme winds — which reached 140 miles per hour — and ended up in the eye, where it’s calm. Once inside, they essentially got trapped, unable to pierce through the fierce gusts of the eye wall.
Storms like Helene can blow seabirds like petrels, jaegers, and frigatebirds far inland. Exhausted, they end up in unfamiliar habitats where they can’t easily find food. “It’s a challenging situation,” said Andrew Farnsworth, a bird migration expert at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “We know that birds do die in these things.”
When skies clear after a storm, however, birds resume their migration en masse, Farnsworth said. “After the storm passes, we see these big explosions of birds at night,”
Birdnado