It's nice to be right. In an earlier blog I wrote how the birds and squirrels in the ravine through which I regularly walk know what weather is coming at least one day ahead. Well, a research paper published recently, by a team from the Univesity Of Groningen in the Netherlands, highlights the behaviour of migrating godwits. No, I'd never heard of them either. However, these birds leave New Zealand, fly to China, take a turn through the Pacific (in mid ocean with no land in sight) and end up in Alaska. 12,000 km no less. Tracking their return journey in 2007 showed that the majority of them left Alaska and timed their departure to coincide with a low pressure system about 1,500 km to the south-west. This gave the birds tailwinds several days after departure as they swept across the Pacific. They are said to ride on the back of that low-pressure system. No one knows how the birds manage this feat of long-distance weather forecasting but enough of them did it to suggest it must be more than a coincidence. Those few that did not ran into storms, and took several days longer to complete their journey, which by the way, ended up less than 13kilometres from their starting point in New Zealand. 24,000 km later. Now if birds, a vertebrate species, can suss the weather in this way, what makes anyone think that homo sapiens, a vertebrate the last time I looked at an xray hasn't got a vestige, at least, of the same capability? Our argument (here at MediClim) is that we aren't all that sapientic... that we don't recognize the warnings for what they are. John, learning still, Bart