I found a website that has looked at the bird migration in each region of the United States and is tracking their movements. For each region, they have multiple charts with specific birds to see which ones have been moving more in the past week, and which ones have been moving less in the past week. It would be cool to go on this website for a whole year and see what birds migrate at different times, and how consistent this timing is over the years. There is also an animation that basically shows bird migration over the past few months.
Within this website, there is an interesting link that further expand upon bird migration. This link defines each region (i.e., what states are in each region), and then talks about when they would expect bird migration. It talks about when you would expect the species to arrive first, then when the number of birds arriving would begin to increase rapidly, when the number would peak, when they would start to leave, and when the final bird would leave. This website is relatively new (created in 2015), so I’m not entirely sure how accurate these predictions would be, but nonetheless it is still interesting.
link: http://birdcast.info/forecast/regional-migration-analysis-10-17-november-2017/#MidwestNortheast
David, great find. I’m excited that you found a website that links birds to geography, two of my favorite topics. This website is certainly influential in creating a centralized hub of information on bird travel and migration, and is impressive in its thoroughness of bird species and the way in which it divides regions. I was reading a little bit about their research and was surprised to discover that most bird migration occurs at night, resulting in the need for several sources of tracking technology to get a detailed report of bird movement. Some nights can have hundreds of millions of birds in the sky! Now that’s a lot of birds.
Cool! I like the idea of “traffic reports” for birds. It’s interesting that in the animation all birds seem to be headed to Florida, both from the East coast and from the Northwest. I would have expected them to head more towards Mexico on their way to South America.