High-Tech Birdwatching

You would think we'd have it all figured out by now. After all, we've been monitoring the bird collision phenomenon for a long time. But we FLAPPERs still show up in droves on cloudy, misty nights when we're sure there will be hundreds of birds to be rescued, only to find that there are more of us than our feathered friends!! Or there will be a night with birds everywhere and a couple of people frantically calling around for reinforcements!!!

Amazingly, the answer is right at our fingertips. Anyone with access to the Internet can punch in www.intellicast.com/weather/buf/nexrad and they're on a site that tracks weather patterns over southeastern Ontario centred at Buffalo, New York...and just happens to pick up large movements of birds as well!

On a favourably clear evening in May, say around 8pm, check into this site and you won't see anything of note. Try again at 9:30pm and you'll pick up a green blob forming around Buffalo, New York and another around Toronto. This green represents migratory birds that have lifted off and are starting to move northward. A band of grey around the edges of the green represents smaller numbers of birds on the periphery of the major bird front. If you check in again at 10pm you'll see that Lake Ontario is partially covered by a green blob. At midnight the lake is covered all the way across to Toronto. By 6am the birds are starting to land, the blob on the lake has vanished, but green areas are still visible at the north and south shores. (Some birds made it across Lake Ontario that night, while others will cross at the next favourable opportunity.) At 7am the green dots have vanished as the birds have all settled for the day.

How do we know that these green blobs represent birds? John Black, a Brock University Physics professor with a long-standing interest in birds, assures us that the blobs correspond with the data that he picks up on his radar screen, radar that's literally for the birds.

John started a number of years ago monitoring the movements of birds using sound. He would record the peeps and chips and assorted calls of birds migrating overhead during the night then proceed with the laborious task of counting the calls to try and determine how many birds were flying past. The method worked well for discerning species (with the exception of flycatchers and vireos which don't call during migration) but it was difficult to come up with accurate numbers.

So John decided to try radar. Two years ago, with a tracking device that had originally been used at the Wood's Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts, he set up a station on the roof of his building at Brock. John runs the radar all night long during selected migration nights. The conical radar tracks the birds flying within a one-kilometre span over the university from 200 to 1000 metres above the roof. This is merely a sampling of the birds moving across the Niagara Peninsula (there's nothing special about the positioning of Brock University from a songbird's perspective!) and does not take into account the birds that may be migrating at lower or higher altitudes (even as high as two and a half kilometres above the ground).

So what happened this past spring when so few birds were seen in downtown Toronto or even at the banding station on the Toronto Islands? Quite simply they took advantage of the clear weather, came sailing across the lake and just kept on going. The proof: John had nights of up to 20,000 birds!

North of Toronto, near King City, John worked with Norm Donaldson of the Atmospheric Environment Service of Environment Canada collecting data on birds during the last two weeks of May this year. He looks forward to continuing this work in the fall when the information gleaned from this specialized radar station is likely to be most useful to FLAP as we await the passage of the fall migrants. Unfortunately, the King City radar is not yet available to the public.

Of course the disadvantage to the radar is that it cannot tell what species or even families of birds are migrating. In fact, John says: "It could tell the difference between a 747 and a hummingbird, but that's about it for now!"

Nevertheless, the information is invaluable to FLAP (it saves wear and tear on our poor bodies!)...and it reassures us to know that thousands of migrants made it safely to their nesting grounds this spring.