HOW BIRDS WEATHER BAD STORMS
At Point Blue, some scientists have been talking about how birds responds to big storms like this – for example, do they know ahead of time that they should fatten up? (Thanks Nat, Libby and others!)
- Rogers et al. 1994 (http://www.indiana.edu/~kettlab/pubs/Rogers1994.pdf). They look at juncos, and then propose that there are three ways that birds respond to bad weather – predicting, responding, or a hybrid of predicting/responding.
- Katti and Price 2001. (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1365-2656.1999.00331.x/pdf). They look at an old world warbler over wintering in India, and show that changes in fat during the winter are associated with rainfall, and that these changes may explain a delay in molt.
- Goodman et al. 2012. (http://www.prbo.org/refs/files/12135_Goodman.pdf ). This is a paper we published with data from Palo and Coyote Creek Field Station in the South Bay. In the paper, we show that body size of birds has been increasing – and we hypothesize that an increase in body size may be a response to more frequent severe storms.
- Breuner and Hahn 2003 http://dbs.umt.edu/research_labs/breunerlab/documents/BreunerandHahnHandB2003.pdf looked at the role that corticosterone plays in mediating territory abandonment in bad weather in WCSP on Tioga Pass.
- Breuner et al 2013 http://jeb.biologists.org/content/216/11/1982.long#aff-3 provide evidence that WCSP can detect changes in barometric pressure preceding a storm.