Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Gonna be a bird catastrophe over the Gulf tonight

And they’re pissed when the feeder isn’t there. I took one of mine down for a few minutes to clean it. Birds would come looking for it and raise hades when it wasn’t there. They’d fly away a hundred feet or so then zoom back like they couldn’t believe it wasn’t there. It was all a bad dream to the birds…I put it back as soon as the sugar water cooled and they woke up from their nightmare ! I’m such a softy I now have four feeders so I just rotate the feeders out. Two out hanging and two cleaned waiting in reserve.

Thanks for making me look up higher 🙂

I’m using Windy.com as a reference and I just realized it can project windspeed up to 9,000m (~close to 30,000ft) and above. Indeed, gentle southern winds at the surface on the Gulf today overlain by strong perpendicular Westerlies higher up.

Doesn’t seem as if Windy or anyone else puts out previous data, so I couldn’t find Saturday.

But looking around the hemisphere at current high wind/gale events like we experienced this weekend it does seem unusually strong and sustained winds at the surface are aligned with and maybe driven by strong winds higher up, at least out to 30,000ft, taking about 25,000 ft as currently known elevation lints for bird migration in general.

So I’m still saying a major mortality event prob’ly just happened this past weekend.

And as far as high altitude migratory insects go, there’s about 40 million freetail bats in this county (20 million females in just one cave) who are up high feeding on migratory noctuid moths ( like corn ear worms) all summer long. In the fall southbound dragonflies are so numerous over the gulf they create radar scatter and huge flocks of purple martins, to name just one species, follow ‘em south.

Tks again for the altitude reference.

Sumtin is telling me these migratory birds got this all figured out and through our observations with the help of advanced technology, we're still just barely catching up on understanding what these birds have long known.

Is it possible these birds intentionality wait on the seasonal fronts to come along to start their journey so they can ride the associated winds to shorten the time it takes to cover the distance?

Every creature I've ever observed for any length of time be it fur, feather or fin has shown reaction to barometric pressure drop.

The Deer and Elk will feed all day long ahead of a incoming front so they can afterwards lay up in protected areas while they wait out the storm.

The migration of spawning Salmon has similarities, near the end of their journey they stack up along the Alaskan coast line.

The commercial fishing fleets will be nervously waiting for them to make their run through the legal fishing zones.

It's the same thing every year, the barometric pressure drops, a front moves in and Salmon come charging through in the worst of weather.
I'm not aware of the Salmons reason for prefering to run in a storm but it's what they do.

The fatality rate for these little migratory birds probably varies form year to year but is it sustainable?

I'm thinking it is, maybe there can be short term population fluctuation but hell, only 2% of the Salmon make it from egg to spawning adult.

This ain't there first rodeo, they'll be OK, they're way ahead of us, they got this all figured out.

Amazing that salmon at sea know what the barometric pressure is, maybe the sound of the accompanying waves. Still, it’s a tall order for a songbird staging in the evening on the Yucatán to be aware of an approaching front 500 miles or so to the north. I suspect they just roll the dice and as long as births=deaths in the long term it’s a going concern.

Nother photo from the coast, illustrating the relative size of the birds involved. Those two dots on the fence are migrating warblers 🙂 but hey, small as they are they weigh about twice as much as hummingbirds. Way up on the tundra (where I have never been) abundant little savannah sparrows are commonly referred to by birders as “tundra fleas”, maybe these things would be referred to as “forest fleas” were they more visible amid the foliage.



The one on the lower left is a chestnut-sided warbler, the one on the top right is one of these, one everybody looks for because they are so pretty, a blackburnian warbler. That throat is just incandescent.



It’s one of those warbler species that divide up the canopy of the vast Canuck Northwoods, hanging out at the top of the spruce canopy. In the winter it’s one of the most common birds in the Colombian highlands, we tend to forget lots of “our” birds spend half their lives in the Tropics.

October of ‘22 one of these blackburnians showed up on a little island off of England, and hordes of “twitchers” went to see it, the odds against one of these little birds surviving crossing the Atlantic and then actually being seen by someone who knew what it was being miniscule. People were hiring inflatable dinghies to get out there

Even though fish can be far below the water’s surface, they can still feel the changes in air pressure. Although studies have been inconclusive, many scientists think a change in barometric pressure causes pressure on a fish’s sensitive swim bladder making the fish uncomfortable. When barometric pressure drops, fish feel less pressure on its swim bladder resulting in the swim bladder uncomfortably expanding in the fish’s body. Fish move deeper in the water column or absorb extra gas into their bladders to adjust to the pressure drop. When the barometric pressure bottoms out, fish are more interested in feeling comfortable than eating so they seek deeper water and become lethargic to relieve the air pressure in their swim bladders.

Under Pressure

In a study on crappie behavior conducted by the late Dr. Loren Hill, the noted zoology professor discovered a steady barometer had little effect on crappie, so during stable weather the fish remained in the shallows to feed and spawn in the springtime. When barometric pressure was falling crappie moved away from the shoreline to deeper habitat. The fish remained dormant for six to eight hours after the barometer dropped, and then made their trek back to the shallows when the barometer started rising.

Most birds have excellent natal orientation. Whether that equals memory is not necessarily the same thing, but it might be! I have banded birds in a specific locations and found them again a year later within a hundred yards. Another thing to keep in mind is that while the average life span of a bird is remarkably short, out of the millions of birds of a species, there are many that live many times the average life span.

The more successful an individual is at all of the myriad linked things that get it form birth to a year old the better it's chances of long life become. Because birds have such high metabolism they are that much more susceptible to any single event being a boon or a killer. You see this play out in the reproductive strategies where some meet the challenges by producing prodigiously, and some produce far fewer offspring per year, but may live many years and survive serious injury in doing so.

It makes perfect sense that evolution would favor better memory of where they have been and what happened there. It may well be they have far superior memories to ours, and thheir memoriesmay well operate far differently than ours do.