14 DAY TRIAL // If a species of animal lives in the rain forest, one would expect that they have grown accustomed to the rain. In some instances, water can fall from the sky for days on end, and all creatures living in these areas need to be perfectly adapted to surviving in this environment. However, it would appear now that not all inhabitants of the jungles can easily withstand these harsh conditions. This is the case of the white-ruffed manakin, a bird that is so stressed out by the rain that it continuously migrates.
For a long time, researchers have been curious to determine why the creature continuously migrated up and down slopes in its native rain forest, for no apparent reason. This behavior is not unique to this species of manakin, as other tropical birds have been observed to do the same. Following a new scientific study, researchers hypothesized that the behavior might be due to the fact that these animals simply can't stand the rain. For years, specialists believed the birds were simply following the migration of their food sources, but now this idea has been infirmed, ScienceNow reports.
The white-ruffed manakins are especially stressed out by downpours and large rainstorms, when vast amounts of water fall on their homelands. Ecologist Alice Boyle, from the University of Western Ontario, in Canada, says that the migration of food sources can only account for a small portion of ongoing bird movements, and not for entire migrations. Her studies of this bird species revealed that males – which are smaller than females, and therefore need to feed more often – tend to migrate a lot more than females do. However, the habit depends on the region they are in at the time the rain comes.
The fact that these birds (both male and female) tended to migrate more if they were originally nested at higher elevations was what gave Boyle her idea. She correlated this fact with datasets showing the amount of precipitations falling at higher altitudes, and sure enough, there was a connection. “I put all this together and thought, 'It has something to do with storms',” the expert reveals. She adds that the rain may simply reduce the time birds spend airborne by such an amount that they can no longer procure enough food. As such, they migrate at lower altitudes, where there is less rain, and their chance of getting more to eat increases.