(WPT) Many People Flee Hurricanes. Some Birders Flock to Them.
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Many People Flee Hurricanes. Some Birders Flock to Them.
2018-09-19 13:10:58.576 GMT
By Karin Brulliard
(Washington Post) -- As thousands of North Carolina residents were hunkering
down or fleeing from Hurricane Florence on Thursday, 21-year-old Alec Hopping
got into his car in Ithaca, N.Y., and headed toward it.
His Toyota Prius was loaded with three cans of gasoline, first-aid supplies,
snacks, cameras, binoculars. His phone was loaded with radar apps to track the
storm. His destination was the eye of the hurricane, where he and a friend,
Logan Kahle, hoped to witness something known as "fallout."
Fallout, in this case, meant birds, lots of birds, and strange ones at that —
seabirds on shore, shorebirds far inland, tropical birds way out of their
range.
Hurricanes, with their high winds and ocean tracks, can be roller coasters for
birds. Those caught in them are whipped around, and experts say many probably
die of exhaustion. But some make it -- either by getting stuck in the calm eye
or by sheer luck -- and then land far from their home habitats. Some
passionate birders — the kind who keep detailed lists of species they spot —
are there to greet them.
"It's very exciting for birders when that happens," said Walker Golder, the
National Audubon Society's program director of Atlantic Coast flyway strategy.
Storm-birding, or hurricane-birding, is not for the casual bird watcher. It
can involve getting very wet, and it sometimes involves risk. Hopping and
Kahle, for example, retreated from an area 20 miles from the North Carolina
coast when power lines started falling, then headed inland to Buckhorn
Reservoir, east of Raleigh.
The eye seemed stuck offshore, but they had studied reports on websites
including eBird of remarkable bird sightings during past hurricanes. They
figured they would head to a reservoir where unusual birds had shown up during
past storms. They slept in the car. And on Saturday morning, after waves of
various species of seabirds called terns showed up in front of them, Kahle
shouted out: "Trindade petrel!"
The Trindade petrel is a dark-bodied, white-bellied seabird that breeds on
islands hundreds of miles off Brazil and otherwise rarely touches land. But it
roams the Atlantic and often hangs out over Gulf Stream waters off North
Carolina. Only once before, as far as Hopping knew, had it been recorded
inland in North America, and that was in 1996.
And on this morning, it "basically just materialized out of the sky" at
Buckhorn Reservoir, recalled Hopping. His camera had broken, so he quickly
used his phone to take photos through his spotting scope that "look like they
were painted by Monet really far away."
"Oh, it was really worth it," said Hopping, a Cornell University senior
studying environmental science and sustainability. "We were really lucky....
It was shocking and so cool."
Hurricanes affect birds in other ways. In the Carolinas, it's possible that
Florence damaged pine forests that species such as the endangered red-cockaded
woodpecker depend on for nesting and foraging, Golder said. Hurricanes can
submerge river islands where some seabirds nest, and erosion can prompt
worried humans to harden shorelines, removing more habitat that migrating
birds use as stopovers during long journeys south.
But there are upsides, Golder said. Some seabirds nest in sandy spots with
sparse vegetation — the kind of habitat that washover from storms like
Florence can make on barrier islands. In general, birds shelter as best they
can, said Golder, who noted that migrant warblers were busily foraging in his
Wilmington, N.C., backyard when the rains stopped, then retreated again -- to
where, he does not know -- when they resumed their trip.
"Birds have been dealing with hurricanes for as long as there have been birds
and hurricanes," he said.
As for those sought-after birds displaced by storms? Unless they're banded and
tracked, their fate is unclear, Golder said. They probably try to follow
rivers back to the ocean. But without their usual seafood diet, they might not
have the energy to make it, he said.
"It's tough being a bird," said Nathan Gatto, the owner of Wright's Backyard
Birding Center in Winston-Salem, N.C. "It's always something you think about
when you see a really lost bird."
Gatto, 30, didn't go straight into Florence to look for rarities, although he
is the type of birder who has driven 19 hours each way to try -- and fail --
to spot a Ross's gull that had been reported in New York. But when it came to
a hurricane in his state, he said he didn't want to be that birder who got in
trouble and required rescue.
Nevertheless, he spent six very rainy hours Saturday and eight sopping hours
Sunday looking for birds at a lake near his city, outside the storm's path. He
was rewarded with several terns, including the second recorded royal tern in
Wake County and "cool little shore birds" called red-necked phalaropes.
His birding gear, he noted, is waterproof. "We still got pretty wet," Gatto
said.
Of course, many people in the storm's path got a lot more than wet. Florence
dropped 8 trillion gallons of water onto North Carolina, leading to mass
flooding and the storm-related deaths of at least 37 people in three states.
Knowing that sort of devastation can happen means sightings come with mixed
emotions, birders said.
"I know every birder in North Carolina had this sort of hope that it was going
to come right over and mess some stuff up and bring some birds through, but
you feel a little bad about it," said Sam Jolly, 21, a North Carolina State
University student who spotted an very rare arctic tern and other ocean-going
birds at a lake southwest of Raleigh over the weekend.
"When birders are hoping for a storm, they want it to pass as a weak Category
1, or maybe a tropical storm," said Jolly, adding that he was "not that
hardcore" to want to head into the storm itself.
Hopping, a Colorado native who said he has loved birds since third grade and
went to Cornell because of its renowned ornithology lab, previously traveled
alone to South America to look for birds. But he and Kahle had never birded a
hurricane before, and it didn't take long to realize that it wasn't wise to
stay in the thick of it.
"Shingles were ripping off houses. Parts of rooms were ripping off. You could
lean over at a 45 degree angle and just kind of hang into it," he said of the
winds closer to the coast on Friday. "Once power lines started going down ...
we got out of there."
But the reservoir proved fruitful. There, according to his eBird checklist, he
and Kahle saw 36 species, nearly one-third of which Hopping logged as
"hurricane birds."
"I don't know if I would do the same thing again," Hopping said of his
storm-chasing. "But for a one-time thing, it was really awesome."
Read more:
Two rivals broke American birdwatching's biggest record. But only one can win
the Big Year.
America's toughest record in competitive birdwatching was shattered last year
Nigel, the world's loneliest bird, dies next to the concrete decoy he loved
Nigel, the world's loneliest bird, was no victim. He was a hero.
Click Here to see the story as it appeared an the Washington Post website.
Copyright 2018 The Washington Post
-0- Sep/19/2018 13:10 GMT
