Environmental stochasticity is “unpredictable spatiotemporal fluctuation in environmental conditions”. I think I experienced such a thing when I was caught in a hail storm on the Delaware Bay last week.
Storms were looming as I hustled through surveys that had to be done – counting birds and counting horseshoe crabs on restored and unrestored beaches in Maurice River Township, Cumberland County, NJ.
I planned my surveys in a lucky sort of way where I was only about 50 feet from my truck when the skies started hurling ice. If I had done things in a different order, it could have been a mile.
Just before my escape to the truck, where I sheltered in place as its aluminum truck cap became dimpled by falling ice, i had observed vast flocks of semipalmated sandpipers feeding and resting along the Delaware Bay shoreline.
I didn’t give the much thought to coincidence of a hailstorm with large numbers of shorebirds on the beach until the next day when I returned to the site.
As my friend Byron and I were finishing up horseshoe crab egg surveys, we noticed a dead semipalmated sandpiper. Moments later we found another. Then we put our minds to it and kept finding more and more dead birds. We tallied 10 semipalmated sandpipers, 1 semipalmated plover, a pile of peep feathers, and five broken-winged sandpipers down at the water’s edge, including the on pictured below.
Just north of the location in Millville, much larger hail smashed windshields and caused all manner of havoc.
Brutal as the storm was on the shorebirds, it could have been worse – one of those stochastic events that has the potential to significantly impact shorebird populations (especially in places like the Delaware Bay where a majority of global populations are concentrated) in a way that is totally unpredictable and impossible to mitigate for.
It’s hard to say how many sandpipers died in the storm. We can be certain that we only found a small portion of the casualites.
And here’s a disclaimer: We also must entertain the possibility that the hail wasn’t the cause of the injuries.
I didn’t directly witness birds get killed by hail. I saw a lot of birds just prior to a storm, i experienced the storm in the very place I saw the birds, and found dead birds there less than 24 hours later. Circumstantial evidence to be sure, but I can’t think of any other plausible alternative explanation.