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Pat Shingleton: "Bird Alerts..."

8 years 7 months 1 day ago Thursday, August 27 2015 Aug 27, 2015 August 27, 2015 3:00 AM August 27, 2015 in Pat Shingleton Column
By: Pat Shingleton

When my daughter, Katie, was just a baby girl, we would visit University Lakes for a "duck feeding." We'd go through a loaf or two of stale bread during our visits. Out trips down River Road also brought mixed reviews from those in the car when I would "Mooooo" at the cows, grazing on the levee.  Katie asked, "Where do the birds go when they die?" It was an interesting question whereby I asked friends that were avid hunters if they had every experienced areas of bird cemeteries... The International Business Times reports that last April, a flock of songbirds flew 1,500 miles to their nesting grounds in the Appalachians.  The tagged birds then added another 932 miles to their journey due to an approaching storm. The golden-winged warblers apparently detected tornado producing storms and diverted their flight. Researchers report that it's the first documented event that birds departed their nesting grounds due to an approaching storm. Swooping birds often experience rumbling, created by tornadoes. Noise from tornadoes can travel thousands of miles and is in the "infrasound" range that is outside the range of human hearing. The birds made the right move and in this episode the storms spawned 84 destructive tornadoes in the Appalachians. Once the storm passed the warblers returned to their nesting site.

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