I know I've asked this of various folks before, and probably gotten reasonable if short answers, but I'm blanking out on the reasons.
Can anyone shed light on why radar doesn't really work for detecting night flights in the intermountain West and the West Coast, esp. south? Is it literally that the birds are more spread out or fewer (seems very unlikely to me) or that all those boreal migrants trend east and clump up (seems possible, but shouldn't eliminate all flights) or that something about the topography/geography leads to differences in the effectiveness of radar? I am currently in the Los Angeles Basin, and I realize I'll probably not hear flights like I have out east, just because of migration routes, but I'm still curious about the radar question here. Are there any published or posted resources on this? Thanks, Jesse -- Jesse Ellis Post-doctoral Researcher Dept. of Integrative and Comparative Biology, UCLA -- NFC-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NFC_WELCOME http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NFC_RULES http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NFC-L_SubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/nfc-l@cornell.edu/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/NFC-L 3) http://birdingonthe.net/mailinglists/NFCL.html Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
