Dec 19, 2014 12:51 PM EST By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

Just days ahead of an outbreak of tornadoes in the south and central U.S., a group of golden-winged warblers left their nests to avoid the storms.

According to BBC News, authors of a study published in the journal Current Biology suggested the birds used some low frequency hearing to sense the storms before they arrived.

"This was just a pilot season for a larger study that we're about to start," Streby told BBC News. "These are very tiny songbirds - they weigh about nine grams.

"The fact that they came back with the geolocators was supposed to be the great success of this season. Then this happened."

Study lead researcher Henry Streby, from the University of California, Berkeley, said he and his team set to see if tracking these birds was even feasible.

"It is the first time we've documented this type of storm avoidance behavior in birds during breeding season," Streby said in a press release. "We know that birds can alter their route to avoid things during regular migration, but it hadn't been shown until our study that they would leave once the migration is over and they'd established their breeding territory to escape severe weather.

"The warblers in our study flew at least 1,500 kilometers (932 miles) total to avoid a severe weather system. They then came right back home after the storm passed."

The warblers fled when the tornadoes were approximately 250-560 miles away and there were no other noticeable environmental indicators.

"There's growing research that shows that tornadoes are becoming more common and severe with climate change, so evasive actions like the ones the warbler took might become more necessary," Streby said. "It could come at a cost, though, since such actions place added energetic and reproductive stress on populations that are already struggling."

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