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Young World
Non-stop flight
COMPILED BY ROHINI RAMAKRISHNAN
A female shorebird was recently found to have flown 11,500 kilometres non-stop from Alaska to New Zealand — without taking a break for food or drink. It’s the longest non-stop bird migration ever measured, according to biologists who tracked the flight using satellite tags. The bird, a wader called a bar-tailed godwit, completed the journey in nine days. In addition to demonstrating the bird’s surprising endurance, the trek confirms that godwits make the
southbound trip of their annual migration directly across the vast Pacific rather than along the East Asian coast, scientists said. Scientists found that, on E7’s way back south, with the help of tailwinds, she made the epic 11,500-kilometre flight to New Zealand uninterrupted. “It’s the equivalent of a human running at 70 kilometres an hour for more then seven days,” said Rob Schuckard, a team leader at the Ornithological Society of New Zealand, which helped with the migration research. Along the way, the bird “slept” by shutting down one side of her brain at a time and burned up the huge stores of fat — more than 50 per cent of her body weight — that she had piled on in Alaska. E7 found her way by analysing polarised light to get a fix on the sun by day, even in heavy clouds, and by following the stars at night, Battley said. “They learn the rotation of the sky when they’re young,” he explained.
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