The Science of Birds - Hurricanes and Heatwaves: How Does Extreme Weather Affect Birds?

Episode Date: March 13, 2023

This episode—which is Number 72—is about what happens to birds, not just in bad weather, but in really bad weather. We’re talking hurricanes, floods, droughts, heat waves, tornadoes, maybe even the occasional sharknado, and so on.How do birds deal with all these natural disasters? We’ll get into that.We'll be talking mostly about the more immediate effects of storms and other extreme weather on the survival of individual birds and their populations.Birds are tough little buggers. They’re tougher than they might look. Many of them live long lives in the face of continual challenges like predators, aggressive rivals, wild temperature swings, strong wind, and heavy precipitation. But an extreme weather event can often be the ultimate test of survival for a bird. Links of InterestThe Southwest Is Facing an ‘Unprecedented’ Migratory Bird Die-OffWhere Do Birds Go In A Hurricane?  ~~ Leave me a review using Podchaser ~~Link to this episode on the Science of Birds website Support the show

Imagine you live on the outskirts of Santa Fe, New Mexico. It's a sunny day in September 2020. You're sipping some tea in your kitchen, looking out the window into your backyard. You're feeling pretty relaxed and groovy, but then you notice something strange out in the yard. You go out to investigate, discovering that there are dozens of dead birds scattered on the ground. They look like maybe they're swallows. Looking around, you can't think of why or how this happened. It's baffling and totally bizarre. Soon, however, you learn from the news that similar things are happening not just in New Mexico,

but also in Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and Texas. Songbirds are being found dead or dying by the hundreds all over the American Southwest. Researchers eventually estimated that up to a million birds fell from the sky and died during August and September of 2020. Most of them were migratory species, swallows, sparrows, flycatchers, bluebirds, blackbirds, and warblers. This terrible, seemingly apocalyptic event made headlines across the U.S. So just what the heck happened? As usual, internet trolls and crackpots offered their own unsolicited and unsupported hypotheses.

It was the 5G cell phone towers, man. Or it was aliens testing out their atomic death ray before they try to take over the world. Because, of course, when in doubt, the most logical explanation is always, it was aliens. That might be what some people think, but we aren't some people. We trust in science. The real science-based explanation for what killed all those poor birds has something to do with. extreme weather events hello and welcome this is the science of birds I am your host Ivan Philipson the Science of Birds is a light-hearted exploration of

bird biology for lifelong learners this episode which is number 72 is about what happens to birds, not just in bad weather, but in really bad weather. We're talking hurricanes, floods, droughts, heat waves, tornadoes, maybe even the occasional shark nado, and so on. As you can probably guess, this is one of those death and destruction episodes. As such, it might not provide much fertile ground for my usual schick of nuance. ha-brow comedy. If you do find yourself laughing during this episode, well, shame on you. Anyway, how do birds deal with all these natural disasters? We'll be getting into that. And we'll return to the question of what killed a million birds in the American Southwest a little

later. But first, let me clarify that the focus of this episode is not climate change. I'm not really talking about the long-term ecological or evolutionary responses of bird populations to human-caused global warming and all of that. Instead, I'm talking about the more immediate effects of storms and other extreme weather on the survival of individual birds and their populations. Now, that said, we know that a key feature of climate change is that dramatic weather events are happening more and more often, right? More droughts, more heat waves, more floods, more hurricanes. So today's episode is, in that sense, indirectly related to climate change. Anyway, birds are tough little buggers. They're tougher than they might look. Many of them live

long lives in the face of continual challenges like predators, aggressive rivals, wild temperature swings, strong wind, and heavy precipitation. But an extreme weather event can often be the ultimate test of survival for a bird. How do humans react to extreme weather? We might evacuate by jumping in our cars with a few precious belongings, like our photo albums, teddy bear, fine china, and some rolls of toilet paper. And then we speed away from the danger. Alternatively, we might find shelter to wait out the storm.

But some humans, with questionable sanity, actually seek out dangerous weather. Maybe you've seen those storm chaser TV shows. On the next storm chasers. It's going to be really nasty in a minute. For months, they've been trying to catch a storm. Yeah, we've got a big tornado. We've got a tornado on the ground. Tornado on the ground.

All right, hold out. Birds do pretty much the same sorts of things when faced with oncoming storms. They try to get away as fast as they can, or they take shelter. Or like some crazy humans, birds may even choose to fly into the storm. Let's start with hurricanes. What's the difference between a hurricane and a typhoon? It sort of sounds like I'm trying to. to set up a stupid joke, doesn't it?

Along the lines of, what's the difference between a bird and a fly? Answer, a bird can fly, but a fly can't bird. Except that you and I know that the word bird is also a verb, right? As in, let's bird this patch of forest. Then maybe we can bird the old cemetery and the sewage ponds after that. Bird is a verb. So maybe a fly can bird.

I mean, why couldn't a fly look at some birds, appreciate them, and maybe even keep a mental list of the species it sees in its tiny little brain? How do we know what the fly can or can't do? Who are we to make assumptions about the birding ability of dipterin insects? As for hurricanes and typhoons, they're pretty much the same thing. Tropical cyclone or cyclonic storm are the general terms used by meteorologists to describe massive rotating storms that originate in tropical oceans. In some parts of the world, people call these storms hurricanes. In other parts of the world,

they're called typhoons. We also like to name these storms individually, don't we? For example, we all remember Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Back in 2004, there was Hurricane Ivan, which wreaked havoc in the Caribbean. Before that, in 1997, there was typhoon Ivan that slammed into the Philippines. Listen, meteorologists, I know you guys are trying to do something nice by naming these storms after me, but seriously, you got to cut it out. I don't really want to be associated with something that, you know, kills people and kills birds and all that.

How about the next time you want to honor me by naming a meteorological phenomenon Ivan, you pick something more pleasant? Like, I don't know, a double rainbow or a big puck. A rainbow never killed nobody. Not that, not that I know of. Anyway, hurricane and typhoon are just different names for a cyclonic storm. Such a storm is defined by sustained wind speeds over 74 miles per hour or 119 kilometers per hour. Cyclonic storms are trouble for birds because they can wipe out food resources, ravage habitats, blow birds off course during migration, and destroy or flood their nests. And of course, a storm can kill birds directly through drowning, hypothermia,

or collisions with the ground or objects. Birds have been dealing with hurricanes, cyclones, whatever you want to call them, I'll just call them hurricanes. Birds have been dealing with these things for millions of years. So it seems reasonable to expect they have some adaptations for dealing with such powerful, regularly occurring storms. Indeed, scientists have discovered that some kinds of birds may be able to hear a hurricane long before it arrives. These birds can detect the super low-frequency sound waves made by a massive storm. This is called infrasound.

It's sort of the opposite of ultrasound. Ultrasound is too high for humans to hear, while infrasound frequencies are too low for us to hear. So this ability to hear infrasound may allow birds to get advanced warning of an approaching hurricane. It may not be an adaptation that evolved directly in response to the threat of big storms, but it sure is handy in those situations. Similarly, some birds can also sense the drop in barometric pressure that signals the arrival of a storm. They may also use cues like changing wind speed and direction, temperature, and humidity. Besides flying away, birds may choose the strategy of finding shelter. They can tuck themselves into dense bushes

or into a natural cavity like a tree hole. Some hunker down close to a large tree trunk on the side that's out of the wind, the leeward side. Others will cling tightly to tree branches, hanging on for dear life. Sheltering in place like this might be the preferred strategy for non-migratory resident bird species. Flying away from the storm, on the other hand, is perhaps more common in birds that are actively migrating. Some migratory birds take another approach, a riskier, more hardcore approach. They fly into the storm, into the belly of the beast. How do we know some birds fly into storms? We know. This happens because there are, at any given time, multiple scientific studies going on that

involve birds being tracked by satellite. The birds are wearing tiny GPS devices, like adorable little backpacks. Often a bird is being tracked by researchers who want to know the path of its migration journey. But then, uh-oh, it just so happens that here comes a gigantic storm. That wasn't part of the plan, for the researchers or the bird. But we might as well look at the GPS tracker data to see how it all plays out. That's what happened back in 2011 when researchers were tracking a Wimberl on its migration from the Canadian Arctic down to South America.

The Wimberl is a pigeon-sized shorebird species with a long, down-curved bill. The name of this particular individual Wimberl is Chinkapin. Chinkepin encountered Hurricane Irene off the east coast of the coast of the island. Florida. Meteorologists went with the name Irene that year, thankfully, instead of Ivan. Rather than trying to alter course and skirt around the storm, Chinkapin the Wimberl just dove right into the most violent part of the storm. Chinkapin was, as the kids like to say, totally metal. It survived its ordeal inside the hurricane and recovered by chilling on an island in the Caribbean. Then it finished its journey.

journey to South America. What a tough little bird! This wasn't the first whimeral to show crazy storm-chaser behavior, and similarly, streaked shear waters in the ocean around Japan have been tracked as they seem to fly deliberately into the hearts of cyclones. Scientists aren't sure why birds like these choose to head into storms rather than around or away from them. But sometimes a bird can get an assist from a storm. The high winds can push the bird from behind, allowing it to gain speeds of 90 miles per hour without having to burn tons of calories. So maybe birds dive into hurricanes to seek these beneficial tailwinds.

Who knows? Sometimes birds end up deep inside a hurricane whether they like it or not. You know how there's the eye of the storm, right? the circular calm center? Well, on multiple occasions, flocks of birds have been detected flying around inside the eye of a hurricane. Flocks show up as distinct blobs on radar images. The relatively peaceful eye of a hurricane can be 45 miles wide, or about 65 kilometers. Surrounding the eye is a wall of violent thunderstorms, where the deadliest conditions are. Birds that somehow get swept up in the storm can become trapped inside the eye. They have to keep moving with the hurricane,

staying within the eye if they have any hope of surviving. This is one way that migrating birds can get blown off course. Hurricanes are often responsible for the appearance of rare birds in distant lands. For example, in 2005, Hurricane Wilma swallowed up hundreds, or more likely thousands of migrating chimney swifts. The tiny birds had been trying to migrate from eastern Canada to South America. Surveys immediately after the hurricane found chimney swifts scattered all over the place. They ended up in Western Europe, far beyond the boundaries of their normal range. Birders in the UK, Ireland, and France rejoiced because they got to see a species that, for them, is incredibly rare. What might have been a positive,

A positively delightful experience for those European birders was not so great for the chimney swifts. Over 700 were found dead in the wake of Hurricane Wilma. Swifts, that is, not birders. And the entire population of this species in eastern Canada was cut down by an estimated 50% that year. Another phenomenon that thrills birders, but pretty much sucks big time for birds, is called a fallout. When migrating birds run into a hurricane or just some really nasty weather, they can be forced to land. This happens most frequently to birds that have been flying nonstop over the ocean for days. They hit a storm with strong headwinds and don't have the energy to fight it.

Thousands of exhausted migrating birds sometimes flutter to the ground, typically along the coast on the first strip of land they can reach. This is a fallout. Birders lose their minds when there's a fallout. They rushed to the spot in droves to witness the avian spectacle. I experienced a minor fallout once, and I have to admit, it was pretty awesome. In that instance, there were trees full of migrating Western tanagers. The birds were grounded by some unseasonal thunderstorms. Western tanagers are bright yellow with orange-red faces.

This species is one of the most colorful birds that breed here. here in the northwest, and I'd never seen so many in one place. Despite the abilities of birds to detect hurricanes early and their efforts to escape the wrath of these extreme weather events, many birds still get killed. Chinkapin, the metal wimbril, survived a hurricane, but researchers have tracked other storm-chasing wimbrils that weren't so lucky. It turns out that heading directly into a hurricane is a risky move. Hurricanes can be deadly to non-migratory species as well.

For example, there was this study published in 2021 on modelled ducks living on the Gulf coast of Louisiana and Texas. Researchers documented that in 2020, Hurricane Laura killed 40% of the ducks that had been fitted with GPS trackers. Like other members of their family, model ducks drop their flight feathers after the breeding season. That means they can't fly until their new feathers grow in. The period of temporary flightlessness lasts about 30 days and happens to coincide with the hurricane season. Flightless model ducks have no choice but to take shelter and hope for the best when a hurricane roars

through their coastal habitat. They're pretty much literally sitting ducks. In 2017, Hurricane Maria slammed into the islands of Puerto Rico in the Caribbean. This is home to the critically endangered Puerto Rican parrot, Amazona Vitaida. A long history of habitat destruction and other factors had reduced this species to just 13 individuals by 1975. Captive breeding programs have since brought the populations back up into the hundreds, although many of those birds are still in captivity. Hurricane Maria was devastating to the people and infrastructure of Puerto Rico.

and the tiny patches of Puerto Rican parrot habitat that existed before the hurricane were also heavily damaged. Many parrots were killed and their populations were dramatically reduced by the storm. Scientists have been working hard in recent years to restore parrot habitats in Puerto Rico and to increase their populations by releasing captive breadbirds into the wild. The southern hairy-nosed wombat lives in the arid grasslands of southern Australia. Now, if you're thinking, wait, a wombat isn't a bird, it's a mammal, a filthy, filthy mammal. You are correct on both counts. You might have zero interest in mammals, and that's fine if that's how you roll, but just hear me out.

Wombats are fossorial marsupials. Fossorial means that they dig. They make burrows. You can hear that there's a connection with the word fossil there. Even in the heat of midsummer, temperatures down in the darkness of a wombat burrow are relatively cool compared to the surface. This fact seems to be well understood by some birds living alongside wombats in the grasslands of Australia. In 1982, South Australia was hit by a summer heat wave. The air temperature hit 117 degrees Fahrenheit in late January. That's 47 degrees Celsius. Researchers surveyed several Wombat borough networks during the 1982 heat wave. They discovered birds

hiding out in the underground chambers. As many as 25 individual birds were found in a single borough. These represented five species, yellow-rumped thorn bill, southern white face, brown tree creeper, dusky wood swallow, and gray curawong. Birds, especially those living in warm, dry environments like the outback of Australia, have adaptations for dealing with heat. They pant, they open up their contour feathers, spread their wings, they'll instinctively seek shade or water. or if there happen to be lots of filthy wombats or other fossorial mammals around, some birds will go underground, apparently. So heat waves and droughts are two other types of extreme weather events.

As the planet warms up with climate change, heat waves are becoming more and more common in many places around the world. Most of the worst heat waves on record have happened in just the last decade or so. Birds can't always escape the heat, unfortunately, no matter what they do. In June 2022, Spain was hit hard by a heat wave. It had been 40 years since such an event had happened that early in the season. The heat wave was terrible for birds, especially because June is the time of year that many birds still have chicks in the nest.

Dehydrated and overheated, chicks across Spain were jumping out of their nest, in desperation to escape the heat. These birds were too young to fly or survive on their own. They ended up injured or dead on the ground or at risk of dying. The common swift was one of the species that many people encountered on the ground, below nests clinging to the sides of buildings. Wildlife care centers took in large numbers of rescued swifts and other birds during the heat wave. A similarly extreme event occurred recently in the Pacific Northwest.

here in North America. This is where I live. In June 2021, a record-breaking heat wave killed 107 people in the northwest. The national temperature record for Canada was broken that June, hitting just over 121 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 49.6 degrees Celsius. In case you don't know, that kind of temperature is just insane for this region. And where was I during this awful heat wave? Weirdly enough, I happened to be leading a birding tour in Iceland at the time. Iceland, of all places. The heat wave hit right after I left home. My family, friends, and backyard birds are all suffering through sweltering temperatures,

and meanwhile, I am all bundled up in a thick coat, bopping around in a country with ice in its name. Wildlife care centers here in the Portland, Oregon region, were taking in dozens, if not hundreds of weak and injured birds. many of them nestlings because just like what happened in Spain this heat wave hit during the nesting season young birds were leaping out of their nests among them were songbirds and lots of raptors like eagles hawks and falcons

heat waves can kill birds indirectly too for example there was a persistent heat wave that hit the northern Pacific Ocean in 2014 through 2016 The sea surface warmed up over a massive area, like at least 1,000 miles wide, 1,000 miles long, and 300 feet deep. Meteorologists ended up naming this marine heat wave, The Blob, which is, I must admit, a pretty great name. But hey, meteorologists, if you're listening, please don't name a blob after me. Even Hurricane Ivan is way better than Ivan the blob. The blob of 2014, with its overheated seawater, reduced the growth of microscopic phytoplankton.

Those are the photosynthetic organisms that make up the base of the marine food web. Dramatic changes to phytoplankton abundance affected the abundances of zooplankton, which then affected the populations of fish, both big and small. Common meurs are seabirds of northern tempered oceans that depend on a diet of small fish and invertebrates. In Europe, the common myrrh goes by the name Common Gilamont. In 2015 and 2016, at least 65,000 common murs washed up dead on the beaches of California, Oregon, and north up to Alaska. The blob had seriously messed up the marine ecosystem, and common murs couldn't find enough fish to eat. Their attempts at breeding failed,

and they starved to death by the thousands. So this heat wave, the blob, didn't kill the birds directly. They didn't overheat or die of thirst. They were killed by the indirect effects of the blob, which had rippled through the ecosystem, from the phytoplankton to the zooplankton all the way up the chain to the meurs. Droughts are typically longer-lasting extreme weather events.

They happen over months or years, rather than days or weeks. A drought can have many negative consequences for birds. One thing often associated with drought conditions is wildfire. Fires are more likely when the vegetation and soil have been dried out for a long time. I went into depth on the relationships between wildfire and birds in episode 40 of this podcast, so I won't really go into that here. But let's return to New Mexico and the American Southwest where we started today's episode. There were all those swallows, flycatchers, bluebirds, warblers, and other songbirds dropping out of the sky in September 2020, dying by the thousands. Over the last couple years,

scientists have been trying to figure out the cause of this mass mortality event. There's still some uncertainty, but a plausible story has been pieced together. It starts with fire. The summer of 2020 was one of the worst wildfire seasons on record in the western part of North America. Over 10.2 million acres, or 41,000 square kilometers of land was scorched in that terrible season. In one study, researchers ran statistical analyses that combined environmental data with citizen science observations of dead birds from the Southwest Avian Mortality Project. That project used the I-Naturalist app as its platform. The results from this study suggested that the biggest environmental variables associated with

the die-off of birds were one, distance to wildfire, and two, air quality. Now, at one point in the published paper for this study, this tragic event was described as a, quote, Massive birds dead off. A dead off rather than a die-off. Not just any old dead off, a dead off of massive birds, no less. Because as everybody knows, that's the worst kind of dead off. I'm guessing English is not the first language of the researchers who wrote the paper, and that's fair enough. No problem there. I blame the editor for not catching this dead-off error. Am I a petty little jerk for pointing this out? Definitely. But, but, it caught my eye, and I just think it's morbidly funny. Sorry. So, fires and air quality.

Low air quality in this case would be from the smoke and toxic gases released by the fires. In general, more dead birds were found closer to wildfires and in regions with low air quality. It seems very reasonable to think that wildfires had something to do with the deaths of so many birds. But another extreme weather event came into play as well. a severe cold snap in mid-September. So it was a double-whammy sort of situation. Scientists have now proposed the following scenario to explain the massive die-off of migratory birds in 2020.

The heat on the West Coast was too much to bear for birds feeding and migrating along the Pacific flyway. Smoke from wildfires made the problem even worse. So enormous numbers of birds changed course. They flew much further inland than they normally would. Once inland, the birds were in unfamiliar territory. The relatively arid environment offered much less food than the birds needed to fuel their long-distance flights. They were going hungry, losing weight, and losing stamina.

Then things got worse. A severe cold snap, with snow and high winds, hit the rocky mountain states. The stray migrants were forced to fly south to escape the icy blast. After flying all that way without enough food, the birds fell to the ground in the southwestern states. They couldn't go any farther. We don't know if this is what really happened, but it makes sense, and it's the best scientists have come up with to explain the catastrophic loss of all those poor little birds. periods. Periods of extreme cold can be especially dangerous to birds.

A dramatic example was the great ice storm of 1998. This hit eastern Canada and upstate New York in January that year. The storm came as freezing rain, which ended up coating everything with an ice layer several inches thick. Bird population surveys revealed that the numbers of some species dropped significantly immediately after the Great Ice Storm. Species that suffered included Morning Dove, Harry Woodpecker, Downey Woodpecker, Blue Jay, Black Cap Chickadee, and Brown Creeper. It's possible that local populations of these birds were reduced simply because some

individuals flew away to escape the storm. But it also seems likely that many were caught in the storm. storm and died of hypothermia. Even when conditions aren't as extreme as all that, winter at high latitudes can be a difficult time for birds. Many species are just surviving day to day in winter, trying to find enough food to keep their body temperatures high enough to survive one more night. Then throw an extreme event like an ice storm or a polar vortex at them, and birds can be

pushed to the utter limit. Episode 21 of the Science of Birds podcast was, and still is, about how birds survive in winter. In that episode, I talked about the many ways birds try to keep warm and stay alive in the cold months. I covered countercurrent heat exchange, torpor, food cashing, all of that fun stuff. If you listen to that episode, you'll have a better understanding of how birds might respond to extreme cold weather. Extreme weather events. We've covered hurricanes and heat waves, and along the way we touched on droughts, fires, and ice storms.

When considering how such events affect birds, there are many perspectives we can take. We can look at this question from different angles. For example, we can zoom in, to look at how individual birds respond to an extreme weather event, like when researchers monitored the satellite tracking data for Chinkapin the Wimberl as it flew into a hurricane. Or zooming out to a wider perspective, we can look at bird populations, like the population of common murs in the North Pacific Ocean, or the population of chimney swifts in eastern Canada. We can also study the way

extreme weather affects entire species and communities. By communities, I mean groups of interacting bird species. For example, a researcher could investigate the effects of cyclones on a community of 12 wetland bird species on the coast of Bangladesh. The most obvious effects of extreme weather are immediate and short-term. But these events often have long-term effects, too. Sometimes the long-term effects are even worse. For example, many birds might survive a nasty hurricane only to starve to death weeks later because the storm destroyed the food plants that they depend on. This also highlights the difference between the direct effects of a weather event versus the indirect effects. Many Puerto Rican parrots, for example, were killed as a direct

effect of Hurricane Maria. But over 65,000 common meurs died of starvation as an indirect consequence of the heat wave known as the blob. A more subtle, indirect effect is what happens to reproduction. An extreme weather event might weaken adult birds, damage nesting habitat, and or reduce the amount of food available. So the breeding birds that survived the event might have much less success when they try to raise a family. They might lay fewer eggs or have fewer surviving offspring. For example, there was this 13-year study of lesser kestrels in Portugal. The researchers figured out that offspring survival in these kestrels dropped by 12% in years with extreme droughts. Nestling and juvenile birds are generally more vulnerable than adults

to the ravages of extreme weather. In fact, the weather is the second biggest cause of death for young birds, both directly and indirectly. Can you guess what the number one cause of death is? No, it's not aliens, but that's close. Sort of. It's predators. So we've got differences in how extreme weather affects juvenile versus adult birds, direct versus indirect effects, short-term versus long-term effects, individual responses versus species-level responses and so on. We can also see that uncommon specialist bird species are more vulnerable to extreme weather

than common generalist species. A specialist species that depends heavily on one kind of fruit, for example, might be hit very hard if the trees that produce the fruit are all knocked down during hurricane. A generalist species, on the other hand, can just switch it up and eat something else. Then there's the contrast between resident birds and migrants.

Migration itself might be, in part, an evolutionary response to extreme weather. By heading elsewhere, migrants often escape the worst weather that hits their breeding areas. But migrants are, in many situations, more vulnerable. They burn enormous amounts of energy on their long flights. If bad weather forces them to fly farther or harder, that can be deadly. Likewise, if the weather does something to reduce food availability in the places where migrants typically refuel. This seems to be what happened in the massive birds dead off of 2020 in the southwest U.S. Up to a million songbirds ran out of energy and starved because of wildfires followed by extreme cold.

Most of the birds that died were migratory species, not residents. Now look, I know this is all pretty morbid and depressing. I wouldn't say it's fun to think about birds dying in all these different ways. I'd be able to find some comfort if we were talking about weather events that are just as infrequent today as they were 5,000 years ago. If that were true, we could just say, well, nature is cruel sometimes, but that's just how it goes, circle of life and all that. But countless scientific studies have revealed that hurricanes, heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and floods are all becoming much more frequent. Because of human-caused climate change. Besides the gradual warming of the planet, a major consequence of climate change is the increase in extreme weather events.

Birds are indeed tough little buggers. They've been dealing with lousy weather for millions of years. As a result, they have a suite of physical and behavioral adaptations that help them survive. But will all that be enough? Will they have what it takes to weather all the storms to come? Thank you for listening to the show today and for your curiosity about birds. I hope you enjoyed this topic despite all the death and destruction, and that you're looking forward to the next episode.

My community of supporters on Patreon is making a big difference in keeping this podcast running. So a huge thank you to all my patrons. And here's a shout-out and warm welcome to my newest patrons. Emily Kim, Matt Marolda, Chuck Blakinger, Jamie Watson, Karolee Moran, Klaus Bilefeldt, Jake Allarding, Douglas Jarrell, Layton Register, and Hillary Hankey. Thank you all so much for the show. the support. How does one become a patron, you ask? It's easy. Just open a web browser and navigate

yourself to patreon.com slash science of birds. Have a look and see if you'd like to join the party. You can also shoot me an email if you have something you'd like to share with me. Perhaps you'd like to shower me with praise for the work I'm doing. Or you want to scold me for making some egregious error. Or maybe you just want to tell me what weather phenomenon you'd like to have named in your honor. A blizzard, maybe, or a mudslide, or a dust devil. In any case, you can send your email to Ivan at Scienceofbirds.com. You can check out the show notes for this episode, which is number 72, on the Science of Birds website, Scienceofbirds.com. This is Ivan Philipson, wishing you a lovely day, a day full of double rainbows and big puffy clouds. Peace.

Thank you.