Songbirds and their so-called passerine kin may be notorious lightweights — if a sparrow were a letter, it could travel on a single stamp — but that doesn’t mean they’re as helpless as loose feathers in the wind. Passerine means perching, and the members of this broad taxonomic fraternity all take their perching seriously.

When a storm hits, a passerine bird can alight on the nearest available branch or wire with talons that will reflexively close upon contact and remain closed by default, without added expenditure of energy, until the bird chooses to open them again. If you’ve ever watched a perched bird in a high wind and worried, “Poor squinting thing — could it be blown away and smashed to bits down the road?,” the answer is not unless the perch is blown away with it.

Scientists have found that many migratory birds, especially the passerines, seek to hug the coast and its potential perches as long as possible, leaving the jump over open water to the last possible moment. But for birds over the open ocean, hurricanes pose a real challenge, and they can be blown off course by hundreds of miles. In fact, ornithologists and serious bird-watchers admit they look forward to big storms that might blow their way exotic species they’d otherwise never see in their lifetime.

Hurricane Sandy did not disappoint them. As an enormous hybrid of winter and tropical storm fronts with a huge reach, it pulled in a far more diverse group of birds than the average hurricane, and Web sites like ebird.org and birdcast.info were alive with thrilled reports of exceptional sightings — of the European shorebird called the northern lapwing showing up in Massachusetts; of Eastern wood-pewees that should have been in Central and South America suddenly appearing again in New York and Ontario; of trindade petrels, which normally spend their entire lives over the open ocean off Brazil, popping up in western Pennsylvania; and of flocks of Leach’s storm-petrels and pomarine jaegers, arctic relatives of gulls, making unheard-of tours far inland and through Manhattan.

(At least a couple of these visitors fell prey to New York City’s resident peregrine falcons, which either mistook the seabirds for pigeons or were in the mood to try a new ethnic cuisine.)

Most of the visitors didn’t linger, and once the storm had passed they took off, presumably heading back to where they wanted to be. “Birds have tremendous situational awareness,” said Bryan D. Watts, director of the Center for Conservation Biology at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. “They know where they are and where they’re going, they’re able to fly back repeatedly, and they’ve shown an amazing ability to compensate for being pushed off track.”

Researchers have begun tagging individual birds with GPS devices and tracking them by satellite to gain detailed insights into how birds accomplish their migratory marathons and what exactly they do when confronting a storm.