Pelagic seabirds reduce risk by flying into the eye of the storm

Cyclones can cause mass mortality of seabirds, sometimes wrecking
thousands of individuals. The few studies to track pelagic seabirds during
cyclones show they tend to circumnavigate the strongest winds. We tracked
adult shearwaters in the Sea of Japan over 11 years and find that the
response to cyclones varied according to the wind speed and direction. In
strong winds, birds that were sandwiched between the storm and mainland
Japan flew away from land and towards the eye of the storm, flying within
≤ 30 km of the eye and tracking it for up to 8 hours. This exposed
shearwaters to some of the highest wind speeds near the eye wall (≤ 21 m
s-1), but enabled them to avoid strong onshore winds in the storm’s wake.
Extreme winds may therefore become a threat when an inability to
compensate for drift could lead to forced landings and collisions. Birds
may need to know where land is in order to avoid it. This provides
additional selective pressure for a map sense and could explain why
juvenile shearwaters, which lack a map sense, instead navigating using a
compass heading, are susceptible to being wrecked. We suggest that the
ability to respond to storms is influenced by both flight and navigational
capacities. This may become increasingly pertinent due to changes in
extreme weather patterns.