Imagine having a supernatural power to know when rain has fallen over 1,000 miles away, the distance say from London to Naples.
It may sound like something out of the X-Files, but an Australian bird called the banded stilt has astounded scientists with its ability to find rainwater over vast distances. Normally the banded stilt lives on the coast, but when it rains on rare occasions in the harsh deserts of the Outback, thousands of the birds fly far inland to lakes that fill with salty water.
There the birds gorge themselves on brine shrimps that hatch out in the saltwater before the birds breed.
Researchers followed the birds using satellite tracking for over two years and discovered that they knew exactly when to fly to the lakes.
They also flew at great speed and some of them even took different routes but arrived at exactly the same spot, according to the report in the Royal Society’s journal Biology Letters.
How the banded stilts knew there was water so far away is a mystery. They made no exploratory flights to search for water, and the rains were so scarce and unpredictable there was no way the birds could anticipate them.
Instead, the scientists speculated that the birds may detect rain from changes in atmospheric pressure, or from the sound of distant thunder at low frequencies, or possibly even from the smell of the salt lakes carried on breezes.
Or maybe birds have powers that we can’t even guess at.
