A recent research suggests that songbirds and some other types of birds can sense impending powerful storms from hundreds of miles away and fly away before they hit.
According to a new research on golden-winged warblers in the United States, the tiny birds in the mountains of eastern Tennessee knew in advance that a massive storm was approaching the region.
The tracking data show that the delicate birds fled their breeding grounds just before the storm swept through the central and southern United States in late April 2014.
“The warblers in our study flew at least 1,500 kilometers (932 miles) total to avoid a severe weather system. They then came right back home after the storm passed,” said ecologist Henry Streby at the University of California.
“We know that birds can alter their route to avoid things during regular migration, but it hadn’t been shown until our study that they would leave once the migration is over and they’d established their breeding territory to escape severe weather,” the ecologist said.
Experts say Mother Nature’s early warning system may be better than the advanced technology developed by human beings.
Some studies indicate the sixth sense that birds possess has to do with their ability to hear sounds that humans cannot. Birds and some other animals have been shown to hear infrasounds, which are acoustic waves that occur at frequencies below 20 hertz.
Scientists say events like winds blowing, ocean waves crashing and volcanoes erupting at faraway distances can create infrasounds that birds may be able to sense, even when the events themselves are thousands of kilometers away.
JR/MKA/KA
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