Bird Tracking

The Cooper's Island station was also called upon to do the bird migration studies. The reason for doing this was that flocks of birds might get into the intakes of some of the jets taking off from Bermuda. So they wanted to know the migratory habits of birds flying over Bermuda, and what kind of quantities. Bill Todd noted "There are a lot of birds that fly over Bermuda and if you only realize, some of them go right over and don't stop. There are a lot of them that do stop as they come by. We saw some flocks of ducks, big flocks, ... they flew in a 'V' formation. Some of those ducks flew pretty high - several thousand feet."

"We were tracking this very small target and scientist David Windgate looking through the telescope would say what it was we were tracking. 'Look! this is very tiny what ever it is' so we tracked it, and he said that the only thing he could see in the telescope was a grasshopper. David said that grasshoppers do migrate when the winds are favorable they get up there and migrate from island to island So we tracked grasshoppers as they migrated from Bermuda to the other islands."

First, the operators had to determine what a bird looked like on the tv screen. After a while, they became very efficient to the point they could even tell what species of bird it was - everything from geese to little ones the size of a sparrow or wren.

One time, the crew manning the radar screens actually picked up a swarm of two-inch long insect following directly in the path of the birds.