Seabird Takes Wild Ride On a Typhoon

Oct 27

Oct 27 Seabird Takes Wild Ride On a Typhoon

In August 2019, Japanese researchers tagged 14 streaked shearwater seabirds with GPS trackers with the aim of monitoring their nesting behavior. But when Typhoon Faxai battered the eastern coast of Japan later that month, one of the birds was taken on a wild ride.

The storm didn’t affect the other birds, but one male got caught up in the atmospheric drama – way up. Normally shearwaters fly below 300 feet, this 1.3-pound guy was lofted to ridiculous altitudes of over 15,000 feet.

“As adult streaked shearwaters usually fly only at sea relatively close to the water surface, the observed overland flight with swirling movements at high altitudes was quite unusual,” according to the research published in September this year in the journal Ecology. “Such an event has not been reported before.”

About those swirling movements: the bird was swept up in the rotation of the storm, completing five full loops in circles over the mainland, each ranging from 30 to 50 miles in diameter. Streaked shearwaters normally cruise at speeds between six and 37 miles per hour, but this intrepid fellow streaked along at 56-106 mph.

The ordeal (or joyride, depending on how the bird felt about the proceedings) lasted 11 hours, after which the wandering daredevil reunited with his flock, which had been keeping a low profile – much lower – on the coastline.

“The present study appears to demonstrate an example of behavior of seabirds at the extreme edge between failure and success of survival during a storm,” the researchers conclude. “Further accumulation of such data would contribute toward an understanding of whether and how seabirds manage to survive frequent but irregular weather events.”