geek@mit-amt.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Chris Schmandt) (01/17/90)
An interesting article in Monday's Boston Globe. Seems an ornithologist named Sidney Gauthreaux had been studying recent decreases in the number of Gulf Coast migrants. He wanted to quantify this, and hit upon the idea of using archived NOAA weather radar data. It seems that big flocks of migrants appear quite distinctly on weather radar. And the weather radar stations archive photos of the screens every 20 minutes for something like the past 20 years. Anyway, the preliminary findings indicate a loss of perhaps half the popluation over 2 decades, which is apparently much more significant that the decrease revealed so far by the North American Breeding Bird Survey. This data is only preliminary, and indeed he's looking for funding for more thorough study of the weather radar information. But it's a pretty shocking loss (due to loss of rain forest habitat, of course, is the common belief). I thought these results were pretty dramatic, and the methodology interesting enough to post about it. Perhaps someone has read the original paper? (supposedly at a "symposium on migratory birds last week at Woods Hole"). chris