An experiment on bird migration patterns has inadvertently revealed that some bird species possess a unique ability to detect inclement weather hours or even days before it hits. Researchers from the Universities of Tennessee and Minnesota found that the golden-winged warbler, which travels to the Appalachian mountains from Columbia during the northern hemisphere summer, can detect bad weather up to 24 hours in advance, giving it plenty of time to evacuate.
Publishing their findings in the journal Current Biology, researchers from the two schools say they accidentally discovered all this after pulling data from special geo-locators which they attached to 20 of the birds back in May 2013. The initial goal was to track the general migration patterns of these tiny songbirds, which on average weigh only about nine grams each.
But just days after 10 of the tagged warblers returned to the U.S. from Colombia, a massive storm system just so happened to be making its way into the Midwest and South. Prior to meteorologists even detecting this storm, which caused at least 84 tornadoes, 35 deaths, and more than $1 billion in property damage, some of the birds that still had trackers on them left the area.
