Not a closet ornithologist, but didn't someone once post a question asking if anyone knew of any good books about the flight of birds? I seem to recall that it received no (or few) replies.
OzEx - on a related note, I've used birds to gauge when it was safe to go outside. The last (and it was minor) hurricane we had, six or seven years ago, arrived after midnight and was moving out of the area by mid-morning.
I have four large oak trees on my property, and as you can imagine, quite a few branches were down. I went out to pick them up after I heard the birds start singing, and saw them out and about again. They seemed to know when the worst of the storm had passed.