Move over, Punxsutawney Phil: These birds can also “predict” the weather

For almost 140 years, every February 2nd in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, has seen a bisarr ceremony where a Groundhog named Phil “Forecasts”, if there will be six weeks more in the winter. The tradition has even one day named after it-but are there other animals with weather-predicting abilities that also deserve attention?

First, let’s break the bad news – Groundhogs are not very good meteorologists. While Phil apparently correctly “predicted” an early spring during the last year’s Groundhog day, it is actually something of a wondness. According to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the famous Woodchuck’s forecasts in the last 10 years have only been real 30 percent of the time.

If we suddenly ended up in a scenario where all our weather -expensive technology disappeared, we would probably be a little full if we trusted Phil as a replacement. Instead of this hypothetical reality, birds can be a better place to start.

Golden-Winged Warblers, for example, may be able to sense that a big storm is coming. In 2014, scientists who had traced the birds in the Tennessee discovered that they had flown away from their breeding grounds outside the usual migration season – two days before the arrival of a deadly storm system that fertilized 84 tornadoes.

“We know that birds can change their route to avoid things during regular migration, but it had not been shown before our study that they would leave when migration is over and they had established their breeding area to escape severe weather, “Keep Led Henry Streby said at the time. “The vessels in ours study Flew at least 1,500 kilometers in total to avoid a hard weather system. They then came home after the storm went. “

The team suspects that the birds were able to hear infrasound – it is sound with a wave frequency below 20 Hertz that humans cannot hear – generated by the storm system and took it as a sign to get hell out.

Perhaps even more impressive is Veery, a small species of North American Trast, whose breeding behavior appears to be a predictor for the intensity of the Atlantic hurricane season.

In 2019, ornithologist Christopher Heckscher completed one analysis What was found this year when the hurricane season had been milder, Veries’ breeding season had been longer. Conversely, the season was shorter as the hurricane season was more intense.

In fact, Heckscher’s study found that the birds’ egg laying and any coupling size in May and June “showed stronger contexts with subsequent hurricanes than the early season (before August) meteorological predictions broadly published by CSU, NOAA and TSR”.

How Veery does this is unclear. “Whatever it is, they know in mid -May,” the ornithologist said Audubon Magazine. “It sounds out there, but then again, if you think about it, it makes sense that these birds would benefit from everything they could across their evolutionary history to avoid hurricanes.”

Sorry Phil, I think we look at the birds after our weather forecast from now on.