Birds are incredible navigators, able to travel thousands of miles to the same place every year. But sometimes they end up in the wrong place at the wrong time – like in a hurricane.

Last night, as Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida as a strong Category 4 storm, radar detected a mass in the eye of the storm that experts said was likely birds and possibly insects.

Helene was a massive storm as it moved across the Gulf of Mexico earlier this week. Seabirds likely fled the storm’s extreme winds – which reached speeds of 140 miles per hour – and landed in the eye, where it is calm. Once inside, they were essentially stuck, unable to penetrate the eyewall’s violent gusts. As the storm subsides, the mass of birds will likely dissipate, Kyle Horton, a researcher at Colorado State University who studies bird migration, told Vox.

Storms like Helene can drive seabirds such as petrels, hunters and frigatebirds far inland. Exhausted, they end up in unknown habitats where they have difficulty finding food. “It’s a challenging situation,” said Andrew Farnsworth, a bird migration expert at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “We know that birds die.”

In fact, frigatebirds — large seabirds with square wings and a forked tail — were spotted by birders in central Georgia and even Tennessee this Friday as the storm raged inland.

While notable, it is not uncommon for birds and insects to be caught in the eye of tropical cyclones, according to a study by Matthew Van Den Broeke, a professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. Nineteenth-century reports – many from ships – documented this phenomenon, in some cases noting that the air was “filled with thousands of birds and insects.” One report documented an owl in a storm.

In a 2021 study, Van Den Broeke analyzed the radar of 33 Atlantic hurricanes that hit the U.S. mainland or Puerto Rico between 2011 and 2020. Each one showed signs of birds and insects in the eye of the storm.

Hurricanes like Helene can also significantly impact fall migration, when several billion birds migrate south before winter. A migration map from Thursday evening, as Helene made landfall, shows that millions of birds were migrating west of the storm to places like Texas and Louisiana, but few, if any, were passing through Florida.

However, when the skies clear after a storm, the birds resume migration en masse, Farnsworth said. “After the storm passes, we see these big bird explosions at night,” he told me.

It is also worth remembering that birds have evolved with these storms for thousands of years. They can likely detect an impending hurricane by sensing things like changes in barometric pressure, and they know how to hide during storms, such as by aligning their aerodynamic bodies with the wind.

“They adapted and evolved with it,” Farnsworth said. “Yes, storms are becoming more and more extreme. But birds know how to deal with these things.”