MYSTERY OF THE MISSING MIGRANTS | © Charley Harper Art Studio | Used with Permission

Showcasing the spectacle of bird migration

When, where, and how far will birds migrate? How many birds passed last night? Our tools help you explore the answers to these and many other questions about bird migration.

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POWERED BY

Cornell Lab of Ornithology logo
Colorado State University logo
University of Massachusetts Amherst logo

Migration tools

INACTIVE
Forecasting resumes Aug 01, 2022

Migration Dashboard New!

Explore nightly migration data in your region.  Learn more

Bird migration forecast maps

Bird migration forecast maps show predicted nocturnal migration 3 hours after local sunset and are updated every 6 hours. Colorado State University and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology currently produce these forecasts.
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Local bird migration alerts

Search with our local migration alert tool to determine whether birds are passing overhead near your city tonight!
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Live bird migration maps

See real-time analysis maps of intensities of actual nocturnal bird migration, as detected by the US weather surveillance radar network between local sunset to sunrise. Cornell Lab of Ornithology currently produces these maps.
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Recent news

Reports from the field: Monitoring migration with the BirdScan MR1
By Mikko Jimenez Colorado State University Jun 06, 2022

The BirdCast team loves a report from the field, and today we have one from Colorado - the home of our western base of operations, Colorado State University, where Dr. Kyle Horton directs the AeroEco Lab.  Read more

Migration

Species on the move: Gray-cheeked Thrush arrivals in April
By Andrew Farnsworth The Cornell Lab May 23, 2022

An interesting pattern of Gray-cheeked Thrush arrivals in the central US during April led the BirdCast team to investigate a potential explanation. We looked to the wind.  Read more

Migration

Tracking Hermit Thrushes in Tennessee: the BirdCast Dashboard, MOTUS, and the potential to relate individuals’ movements to large-scale patterns of migration
By Laura Cook Guest Authors May 16, 2022

The recent release of the BirdCast Migration Dashboard inspired much excitement in a broad array of team members, collaborators, colleagues, friends, family, and followers. There are many ways to apply the information you can explore with the dashboard, but one intriguing possibility comes to us from Laura Cook in this post about tracking two Hermit Thrushes.  Read more

All news

NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, using Suomi NPP VIIRS data from Miguel Román, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Lights Out

Every spring and fall, billions of birds migrate through the US, mostly under the cover of darkness. This mass movement of birds must contend with a dramatically increasing but still largely unrecognized threat: light pollution.
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BirdCast Partners and Support

BirdCast is a consortium of interdisciplinary researchers, primarily from three organizations at present, with a growing list of collaborators, supporters, and partners.  Learn more

Core partners

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology Colorado State University UMass Amherst

Core funders

National Science Foundation Leon Levy Foundation AWS Lyda Hill Philanthropies Amon G. Carter Foundation

Other support

USGS The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation NASA Microsoft NOAA BiodivERsA Belmont Forum European Commission

Lights Out partners

Houston Audubon Texas Conservation Alliance Texan by Nature Perot Museum of Nature and Science Dallas Zoo
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