Can Birds Tip Us Off to Natural Disasters?
Researchers think birds can hear hurricanes and tsunamis—a sense they’re hoping to tap into to develop a bird-based early warning system
Five years ago, French navy officer Jérôme Chardon was listening to a radio program about the extraordinary journey of the bar-tailed godwit, a bird that migrates 14,000 kilometers between New Zealand and Alaska. ... Chardon understood better than most how treacherous the journey would be, as ferocious storms frequently disrupt Pacific island communities. Yet, somehow, bar-tailed godwits routinely pass through the area unscathed. Chardon wondered whether learning how godwits navigate could help coastal communities avoid disaster. Could tracking birds help save lives?
This past January, a team from France’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) ... began experiments designed to test Chardon’s idea. Researchers with the new Kivi Kuaka project ... equipped 56 birds of five species with cutting-edge animal tracking technology. ...
The Kivi Kuaka project is focusing on birds’ ability to hear infrasound, the low-frequency sound inaudible to humans that the researchers believe is the most likely signal birds would use to sense storms and tsunamis. Infrasound has myriad sources, from lightning strikes and jet engines to the songlike vocalizations of rhinoceroses. Even the Earth itself generates a continuous infrasonic hum. Though rarely measured, it is known that tsunamis generate infrasound, too, and that these sound waves travel faster than the tsunami wave, offering a potential window to detect a tsunami before it hits.
There is some evidence that birds dodge storms by listening to infrasound. ...
If Kivi Kuaka’s birds are able to perceive infrasound generated by Pacific storms or tsunamis, the scientists suspect the birds will move to avoid them. Tracking that behavior, and learning to identify tsunami-specific bird movements if they exist, may help the team develop an early warning system ...
