What do our feathered friends do during a hurricane?
Like use birds know ahead of time that a hurricane is coming. They are extremely sensitive to even slight shifts in barometric pressure. Depending on the kind of the bird and the location that it finds itself in when it catches the news of bad weather, the bird will chose from one of three options.
Some birds will chose to sit tight and ride out the storm on the ground. Wood peckers for instance will hunker down in their hollowed out tree until the storm passes. This option just like all of the others has its possible down fall. In this case it would be the obvious, which if the tree doesn't make it through the storm then the bird is out of luck.
Some birds just evacuate. The problem with this is that even if they get caught up in the outer winds of the storm they could still wind up hundreds if not thousands of miles away from the homes.
Some birds take the braves rout and fly with the storm itself. They can either stay in the eye of the storm where the weather is calm or the can actually ride the winds in order to increase their flying speed. This course of actions is very trying on the birds because it forces them to go long stretches of time without food or rest. These brave birds can also find themselves at the end of the storm many miles from home.
With Hurricane Sandy many birds were lucky because of its coming late in the migration season most of the birds had already migrated south for the winter.
