Record-Breaking Night Of Bird Migration Caught On Radar During A ‘Perfect Storm’ For Feathered Flight

Record-Breaking Night Of Bird Migration Caught On Radar During A ‘Perfect Storm’ For Feathered Flight

Record-Breaking Night Of Bird Migration Caught On Radar During A ‘Perfect Storm’ For Feathered Flight BirdCast More than 1.2 billion birds streamed south in one night during their Fall migration in late September—the largest single-night total ever recorded by the American live radar project. Called BirdCast, a collaboration led by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the platform uses the same weather radar technology behind daily forecasts to track migrating birds. On its live migration map, BirdCast tracked more than 1.2 billion birds streaming toward their wintering grounds after sunset on September 25—the largest single-night total recorded since the project began mapping live migrations in 2018. “These numbers are almost inconceivable,” said Andrew Farnsworth, a visiting scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and longtime BirdCast researcher. “They’re enormous… even for people that study migration regularly. The scale of how many organisms that this represents, is just mind blowing.”…