THE GODWITS LONG, LONG, NONSTOP
JOURNEY
The birds are cherished by many New Zealanders. The cathedral at Christchurch begins ringing its bells to welcome the birds.
Tens of thousands of bar-tailed godwits are taking advantage of favorable winds for their annual migration from the mud flats and muskeg of southern Alaska, south across the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean, to the beaches of New Zealand and eastern Australia.
They are making their journey of more than 7,000 miles by flapping night and day, without stopping to eat, drink or rest.
“The more I learn, the more amazing I find them,” said Theunis Piersma, a professor of global flyway ecology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and an expert in the endurance physiology of migratory birds. “They are a total evolutionary success.”
The godwit’s epic flight — the longest nonstop migration of a land bird in the world — lasts from eight to 10 days and nights through pounding rain, high winds and other perils. It is so extreme, and so far beyond what researchers knew about long-distance bird migration, that it has required new investigations.
The extraordinary
nature of what bar-tailed and other migrating birds accomplish has been revealed in the last 15 years or so with improvements to tracking technology, which has given researchers the ability to follow individual birds in real time and in a detailed way along the full length of their journey...read more
