Episode
114 - Why Birds Get Lost: The Science of Vagrancy and Range Expansion
- Podcast
- Buzz Blossom & Squeak
- Published
- May 21, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1304
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Summary
In July 2023, a volunteer doing routine piping plover counts at a Wisconsin wildlife area saw a flash of pink out of the corner of his eye. He stopped. He looked again. He started making phone calls. What he was looking at was a roseate spoonbill — a large, flamingo-pink wading bird with a spatula-shaped bill — last confirmed in the state in 1845. Within days, birders were driving from hundreds of miles away, fifty people showing up on a Saturday just to stand at the edge of a wetland and look at a bird that had no business being there. So how does that happen? And what does it mean when it does? The Vocabulary: Vagrant, Accidental, Wanderer Not all out-of-range birds are the same thing. A vagrant is a bird that shows up outside its normal range — unusual, but not unheard of. An accidental is rarer still: a bird so far outside its range that a sighting is essentially a once-in-a-lifetime event. That spoonbill was an accidental — the gap between sightings was 178 years. A wanderer is something else: typically a young bird in its first couple of years, still sorting out navigation, following instinct or wind or food somewhere further than planned. Four Mechanisms That Send Birds Off Course The first and most intuitive is weather. A bird riding the winds ahead of a storm system can end up hundreds of miles off course. Tropical storm remnants and hurricane tails are particularly dramatic — when Hurricane Laura moved through in August 2020, magnificent frigatebirds (birds that belong over warm tropical ocean water and almost never touch land) turned up over the Mississippi River, with sightings as far inland as Tulsa, Oklahoma. Experienced birders have learned to look for rare sightings in the hours after major inland storms. The second mechanism is genetic — and this one i…