Migrating birds love the Lake Erie islands

MIDDLE BASS ISLAND — Migrating birds apparently love the Lake Erie islands as much as tourists do. According to new research from Bowling Green State University, birds flying over Lake Erie like to use islands like Kelleys Island, Middle Bass Island and South Bass Island to guide them on their route. The islands also provide a safe place for birds to make a pit stop, the scientists say. Research on how the birds use the lake islands when they migrate is being carried out by Verner Bingman, a BGSU professor and a graduate student Murphy Harrington, who is working on her master's degree in biology. Harrington set up an infrared camera on Middle Bass Island during the fall migration last year and then returned with her camera during this year's spring migration. A control site set up at Bowling Green apparently confirms that birds prefer an island route. Harrington is continuing her work this fall, but preliminary results have been released. Biologists believed that night-flying birds rely on the setting sun, stars and Earth's magnetic field to navigate. But the new BGSU study suggests birds pay attention to the landscape beneath them, such as the islands, as they deal with a lake crossing that covers about 30 miles. "We're contrasting a site where there's a clear leading line feature — the island archipelago — and Bowling Green, where there's not," Bingman said. "The directional observations of birds over Lake Erie seem much more concentrated than the spread of directions in Bowling Green, which is entirely consistent with the idea that when crossing Lake Erie, the birds are using the islands to hold a ground-based direction and thus avoid being drifted one way or another." BGSU described the study in a news release, but Bingman, responding to a question from the Register, said the birds also like the islands because they provide convenient stopovers when the birds are over the water. "Radar observations of migratory birds over Lake Erie do indeed suggest that the island archipelago can be exploited as a safe refuge during migration, explaining in part why numbers over the islands are higher than over water," Bingman wrote in an email. Knowing where birds like to migrate can be helpful to conservation, Bingman said. "We want to protect wildlife," he said. "If there's a better understanding of how the birds distribute over Lake Erie during migration, we can use the data we've been collecting to inform policymakers of where any eventual wind turbines would have the least impact on the passage of migratory birds."