Millions of migrating birds are getting LOST mid-air because solar storms are warping their natural navigation system

Space weather that disrupts satellites and causes power outages also affects how birds fly, a new study reveals.

Scientists from the University of Michigan (UM) have discovered that migratory birds get lost when the sun emits electromagnetic radiation and charged particles that collide with the Earth’s magnetic field.

Night-migrating birds – such as geese, swans, sandpipers and thrushes – use the Earth’s magnetic field as natural navigation to guide them during their long seasonal migrations.

But when space weather disrupts the magnetic field, fewer birds choose to fly, and the birds that do often end up disoriented or lost due to disturbances to their navigation.

Night-migrating birds – such as geese, swans, sandpipers and thrushes – use the Earth’s magnetic field as natural navigation to guide them during their long seasonal migrations.

Researchers have long known that birds rely on the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate during migration. Homelessness has previously been linked to the same thing And solar activity that can cause aurora borealis in the night sky and disrupt the Earth’s magnetic field.

The new findings were based on large, long-term data sets that demonstrate the previously unknown relationship between nocturnal bird migration and geomagnetic disturbances for the first time.

The team used a 23-year dataset of bird migration across the US Great Plains, a major migration corridor.

Birds choose this route because the Passage Zone extends more than a mile down the middle of the country, extending from Texas in the south to North Dakota near the Canadian border.

The night-migrating bird communities in this area consist primarily of a diverse assemblage consisting of three-quarters (73 percent) of passerine birds such as thrushes and warblers, 12 percent of shorebirds including sandpipers and plovers, and one-tenth (nine percent) of waterfowl Such as ducks, geese and swans.

But when space weather disrupts the magnetic field, fewer birds choose to fly, and the birds that do often end up disoriented or lost due to disturbances in their navigation.

The researchers used images collected at 37 NEXRAD radar stations in the central flight path, which included 1.7 million radar scans from the fall and 1.4 million from the spring.

The researchers matched data from each radar station with a custom geomagnetic disturbance index that represents the maximum hourly variation of background magnetic conditions.

UM space scientist Daniel Welling explained the difficulties of their study: “The biggest challenge was trying to distill such a large data set — years and years of geomagnetic field observations — into a geomagnetic disturbance index for each radar site.

“There was a lot of heavy lifting in terms of assessing data quality and validating our final data product to make sure it was appropriate for this study.”

The research team’s data was entered into two integrated statistical models to measure the effects of magnetic disturbances on bird migration.

The models controlled for the known effects of weather, temporal variables such as night time, and geographic variables such as longitude and latitude.

Researchers have discovered that fewer birds migrate during space weather disturbances.

They also found that those that remain migrate with the wind more frequently during fall geomagnetic disturbances rather than exerting greater effort to fight crosswinds.

“We found broad support for the idea of ​​reduced migration density under high geomagnetic disturbances,” explained senior author Ben Wenger, assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA and curator of birds at the UCLA Museum of Zoology.

“Our results provide an ecological context for decades of research on animal magnetoreception mechanisms by demonstrating community-level effects of space weather on migration dynamics.”

The researchers found that “flying effort” against the wind was reduced by a quarter under overcast skies during strong solar storms during autumn, suggesting that a combination of ambiguous celestial signals and magnetic disturbance may be hampering birds’ navigation.

“Our results suggest that fewer birds migrate during strong geomagnetic disturbances and that migrating birds may have more difficulty navigating, especially under overcast conditions,” said lead author Eric Jolson Castillo, a doctoral student in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Maryland. In the fall”. .

“As a result, they may make less effort to actively navigate in flight, and thus fly more in synch with the wind.”

“Our findings highlight how animals’ decisions depend on environmental conditions – including those that we humans cannot perceive, such as geomagnetic disturbances – and that these behaviors influence animal movement patterns at the population level.”