Surviving Hail Storms

BirdNote^®
Surviving Hail Storms
Written by Bob Sundstrom

This is BirdNote.

    [Thunderstorm with hail]

One day, as it began to hail near Toronto, Marlon Inniss saw several Canada Geese doing something odd. Rather than trying to shield their heads, the geese pointed their bills skyward, directly into the path of the hail.

    [Canada Geese calls]

While it seemed counterintuitive, the geese were pointing the smallest surface area of their sensitive bills, the narrow tip, into the descending hail — minimizing the impact.

Inniss captured the behavior on video, which helped reaffirm an observation made by naturalist Aldo Leopold one hundred years before. He saw Northern Pintails, a species of duck, adopting the same stance in a hailstorm. 

    [Northern Pintail calls]

Birds may take on other postures to protect against hail. Swans and gulls caught in hail storms sometimes tuck their heads beneath their folded wings or into their body feathers.

But birds, even larger species, can’t always avoid injury in a hailstorm. Large hail, two inches in diameter or more, can kill birds. Some storms have had casualties of hundreds of birds at a time. Birds living in open environments — cormorants, ducks, herons — are vulnerable to sudden, pounding hailstorms.

    [Heavy hail]

Fortunately, these are uncommon events. And for lighter hail, they already have a strategy.

    [Canada Geese calls]

For BirdNote, I’m Michael Stein.

###

Senior Producer: John Kessler
Content Director: Allison Wilson
Producer: Mark Bramhill
Managing Producer: Conor Gearin
Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Canada Goose ML 191029491 recorded by J. McGowan, and Northern Pintail ML 278121311 recorded by J. Holmes. Thunderstorm recorded by Gordon Hempton.
BirdNote’s theme was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
© 2021 BirdNote   April 2022         Narrator: ​​Michael Stein

ID# hail-01-2022-04-20    hail-01

References:
https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/fee.1960 
https://www.livescience.com/63245-geese-birds-hailstorm-survive-stare-up.html 
https://www.reshareworthy.com/canada-geese-weather-hailstorm/ 
https://sora.unm.edu/ 
https://britishbirds.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/article_files/V79/V79_N07/V79_N07_P326_329_A076.pdf