A group of songbirds may have avoided a devastating storm by fleeing their US breeding grounds after detecting telltale infrasound waves. It was individual behaviour, they were several hundred kilometres away from each other most of the time.” Details are reported in the journal Current Biology. Remarkably, the warblers had completed their seasonal migration just days earlier, settling down to nest after a 5,000km (3,100 mile) journey from Colombia. Everybody out 
 
 Working with colleagues from the Universities of Tennessee and Minnesota, Dr Streby tagged 20 golden-winged warblers in May 2013, in the Cumberland Mountains of north-eastern Tennessee. In this case, all five indicated that the birds had taken unprecedented evasive action, beginning one to two days ahead of the storm's arrival. "The warblers in our study flew at least 1,500km (932 miles) in total," Dr Streby said. “They all went south east in front of the storm, and then let it go by, or moved behind it. Noise in this "infrasound" range travels thousands of kilometres, and may serve as something of an early warning system for animals that can pick it up. The scientists cannot be sure that the birds picked up infrasound waves from the storm, but previous work in pigeons has suggested that birds might use infrasound to help them navigate. When the storm moved over the study area, battering it with winds of up to 160 kilometres per hour, the warblers were on Florida’s Gulf Coast.
– Days after five tiny golden-winged warblers finished their seasonal migration, flying 3,100 miles from Colombia to Tennessee, they vacated their new home to travel 400 miles south to the Gulf of Mexico. Some 24 hours later, on April 27, 2014, at least 84 tornadoes left a path of death and destruction throughout the central and southeastern US, the BBC reports. The birds' flight was no coincidence, say researchers, who suspect the birds' low-frequency hearing allowed them to pick up infrasound waves from a storm that was 560 miles away when they fled; they left before changes in barometric pressure, wind speeds, or precipitation registered, the Guardian reports. By May 2, the birds had all returned. Some 20 warblers were tagged in May 2013 before they flew to Colombia; roughly half returned to the US. Researchers were only able to capture five. "The fact that they came back with the geolocators was supposed to be the great success of this season," says a researcher. "Then this happened!" An expert adds, "It's very unlikely that this species is the only group doing this." And the study indicates birds may be able to make quick and "dramatic" movements to cope with the "predicted increase in severity and frequency of similar storms" brought on by climate change, even after having just completed a long journey, says David Andersen, who was part of the study published in Current Biology. But an ecologist not associated with the study advises that the findings be taken with a grain of salt, as the geolocators gauged location based on light readings rather than satellites. (Find out how birds stopped growing teeth.)