Last week, Hurricane Helene spun north into western North Carolina causing catastrophic damage, particularly in the Asheville area and surrounding counties. Entire homes and businesses were flooded, some floating away in a horrific wave of debris.
In the midst of it all, some bird-watchers noticed something: People in some of the most heavily impacted areas were continuing to log sightings in the popular app eBird. As it happens, some of those areas—Buncombe and Henderson Counties in particular—have been birding hot spots for years. Less than a day after the storm passed, as many were still assessing the damage, birders were back to chronicling their finds.
Helene made landfall as a category 4 hurricane in western Florida on September 26 before becoming a tropical storm as it made its way north. When it struck Appalachia, rivers overflowed, and flooding buried valley towns. Thousands of homes and businesses were destroyed. The storm’s current death count is over 200, which is expected to rise in coming days as emergency crews reach increasingly remote areas.
For birders, the storm was traumatic. None of them had power, cell service, or water in their homes. But they could walk outside, try to take their mind off of the tragedy unfolding around them, and spot birds both local and exotic to the area. When they finally got limited cell service—either by traveling or by satellite connection or through temporary cell towers—posting their findings to eBird, which has more than 900,000 users around the world, was almost instinctual.
Tambi Swiney has lived in the Asheville area for about two years. An ordained minister, Swiney works as a spiritual director—which is similar to a life coach but focused exclusively on the spiritual. She started birding about five years ago because of her son, who had a budding interest.
“I got serious about downloading the eBird app and the Merlin app that helps you to identify birds by sight and sound,” she says. “Ever since then, it's been something that has just become a part of the regular rhythm of my life.”
Though the Federal Emergency Management Agency has been responding to the most severely flooded areas, she says that she’s primarily had to rely on her neighbors. One, who had a generator, she says, opened up their home to people who needed to charge their phones or boil water.
Swiney began volunteering with her local First Baptist Church to distribute food and supplies donated from both locals and a group in South Carolina. It’s been overwhelming, she says, to come to terms with the “heaviness” of the storm. Birding, she says, has been a source of reprieve. Even before the storm, she had checked for birds in her backyard every day.
“It's been a relief to me to have moments where I'm just looking out the window at the bird feeder hanging on my porch and identifying the birds that are coming up,” Swiney says. “It just has brought some peace and comfort in the midst of this storm.”
Normally, at this time of year, Swiney would have traveled to birding hot spots to look for migrating hawks, which come in by thousands as they fly south. The road to the area is currently closed, so she has birded only in places she can travel to by foot.
Swiney wasn’t able to post her findings on eBird until Verizon set up a temporary cell tower in Asheville. She didn’t look closely at what others were posting but says it’s always been a source of community. She has run into people at known birding areas who recognize her name from the app. On one occasion, it was a woman who helped her find a yellow-crowned night heron. Coincidentally, the woman had met Swiney’s son a few weeks earlier at a nearby lake.
Managed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, eBird started in 2002 as a web-based checklist. By 2015, it had added an app and now collects more than 100 million bird sightings each year. Still, region-by-region, it’s a tight-knit group. “It is a community where we start to recognize names,” Swiney says.
George Ivey, who grew up in western North Carolina, says he doesn’t remember a time when he wasn't birding. Living so immersed in nature, it was a part of everyday life. He says that his area got about 21 inches of rain from the storm, and a hickory tree fell on his house—fortunately not striking the place where he and his family were sheltering. Like most in the area, he lost access to power and water. In the days after, he and his neighbors coordinated a food-sharing system and began using chain saws to clear fallen trees from the roads.
The first morning after the storm, Ivey says, he saw tiny ruby-throated hummingbirds and rose-breasted grosbeaks near his home. Ivey was able to walk to a busy road in his neighborhood, which normally has so much traffic that it’s impossible to bird-watch. It was filled with magnolia warblers, chestnut-sided warblers, and yellow-billed cuckoos. The next day, a rarely-spotted bald eagle flew over his neighborhood.
“It’s just been curious to see how these little things survive in such chaos in their worlds as well,” Ivey says. “Fun to see that nature is surviving in its own way.”
He has to travel about 75 miles to get gas and groceries. His family has made the trip a few times now. When Ivey got access to cell reception, he logged some of his findings on eBird and noticed that others had too. There were many familiar names.
“It’s nice to have those support networks anytime that you're facing difficulties,” he says. “I'm very grateful to have birding as an outlet and something that I can do pretty much anywhere at any time.”
Jay Wherley, who described himself as a “semiretired software engineer,” has lived in the Asheville area for around 10 years and has been birding for about 15. Friends and family recently helped him relocate temporarily to South Carolina, since it’s unclear when his water will be back up and running.
Ironically, he says, birders often look forward to storms. They can bring in entrained birds, sometimes called vagrants or “storm birds,” that get swept up in a storm and end up far from where they usually are. Severe storms can affect thousands of birds, and bird sightings reported by civilians on platforms like eBird can help scientists track the scale of the phenomenon.
“But in this case, that excitement quickly got overwhelmed with the tragedy and everything that has happened,” Wherley says.
For the first few days, the only information about the extent of the damage came from his AM radio and short text updates from loved ones—which came from sporadic satellite phone connection. (Newer iPhones automatically connect to satellite cell service when everything else is down.) Fallen trees rendered him unable to drive and kept him confined to where he could go by foot.
Wherley was birding the morning after the storm. He saw Swainson thrushes, rose-breasted grosbeaks, black-throated green warblers, and blackburnian warblers. “It’s just a daily thing I do,” he says. “It gives me peace.”
Wherley didn’t have access to social media until Monday, when he evacuated. One of the first things he checked was a WhatsApp group, a pillar of the North Carolina birding community that sprang up a few years ago from an email chain. Wherley, a moderator of the group, says that of the 125 people in it, many live in Buncombe and Henderson counties. About two dozen people post often, and over the past few days the most familiar names have checked in to say that they were OK.
A few also posted about entrained birds they had spotted. There were gulls and a parasitic jaeger—which Wherley doesn’t remember being sighted in the area before.
A lot of the people in the group chat had severe property damage from the storm, Wherley says. People’s businesses were destroyed, and rebuilding will be a long, arduous process.
“Some of these birders are going to have a really tough recovery, and they are still posting about birds,” Wherley says. “It gives you that feeling that not everything was destroyed, the birds are still here.”
Update: 10/8/2024, 9:00 AM EDT: This piece has been updated to clarify some of Tambi Swiney’s biographical details.
