Bar-Tailed Godwits

Nature’s Odysseus

To say the bar-tailed godwit has a penchant for travel is to master the understatement. 

Although one of our largest shorebirds, this indefatigable flyer is still only thirteen inches tall and—on a good day—tips the scales at thirteen ounces. Yet every year, bar-tailed godwits manage to fly more than seven thousand miles from the Alaskan tundra—where they nest—to their wintering grounds in the South Pacific off the coasts of Australia and New Zealand. And they make this trip without ever stopping for either food or drink. If only the world’s airlines could figure out how to fly on so little fuel. 

Fluffing its feathers after a quick bath, a Marbled Godwit (Limosa fedoa)—close cousin of the Bar-Tailed Godwit—feeds along the shoreline of Florida’s Fort De Soto Park. (Photo Copyright: Budd Titlow, NATUREGRAPHS)

The veracity of the godwit’s incredible flight—equivalent to a human running nonstop for a week without food or water—was documented in a study jointly conducted by the US Geological Survey and the Point Reyes Bird Observatory (PRBO), a California-based nonprofit organization. Some seventy thousand godwits make this epic journey each September and then fly all the way back to Alaska to nest again in March of the next year. If they really put their “feathers to the metal” and are fortunate enough to have a strong tailwind the whole way, bar-tailed godwits can fly up to sixty miles per hour, making this journey in an incredible nine days!

Other shorebirds demonstrate similar feats of avian derring-do. Eighty percent of the Western Hemisphere’s population of red knots, a sandpiper weighing less than a cup of coffee, fly northward from Tierra del Fuego on the southern tip of Argentina, arriving along the shores of the Delaware Bay and Cape May, New Jersey, at precisely the right time to dine on billions of eggs freshly laid by thousands of horseshoe crabs. After feasting and fattening up on the crab eggs, these intrepid voyageurs travel another 2,500 miles to their nesting grounds high above the Arctic Circle. In one remarkable study, a red knot banded on Cape May in 1987 was seen on the shores of the Delaware Bay in May of 2000. During the intervening 13 years, the researchers estimated that this tiny ball of fluffy feathers traveled a total of about 242,000 miles, a distance farther than from the earth to the moon.

For sheer total distances traveled, the pectoral sandpiper usually swoops off with the first-place award for shorebirds every year. Pectorals winter in southern South America and breed as far north as Central Siberia, a total migratory distance of more than eighteen thousand miles. 

As remarkable as these shorebird migrations are, they still don’t take the ultimate grand prize for the longest total migration of any animal on earth. That honor goes to the arctic tern, which flies forty-four thousand miles from pole to pole each year. Nesting in Greenland in the Northern Hemisphere and wintering along the shores of Antarctica in the Southern Hemisphere, this bird spends its lifetime in perpetual summer. Since arctic terns may live up to thirty years, it’s conceivable that one of these birds could travel more than 1.25 million miles in its lifetime. That’s the equivalent of more than two and a half round-trips to the moon!

Text Excerpted from Book: Bird Brains: Inside the Strange Minds of Our Fine Feathered Friends, written by Budd Titlow and published by Lyons Press (an imprint of Globe Pequot Press).

Author’s bio: For the past 50 years, professional ecologist and conservationist Budd Titlow has used his pen and camera to capture the awe and wonders of our natural world. His goal has always been to inspire others to both appreciate and enjoy what he sees. Now he has one main question: Can we save humankind’s place — within nature’s beauty — before it’s too late? Budd’s two latest books are dedicated to answering this perplexing dilemma. PROTECTING THE PLANET: Environmental Champions from Conservation to Climate Change, a non-fiction book, examines whether we still have the environmental heroes among us — harking back to such past heroes as Audubon, Hemenway, Muir, Douglas, Leopold, Brower, Carson, and Meadows — needed to accomplish this goal. Next, using fact-filled and entertaining story-telling, his latest book — COMING FULL CIRCLE: A Sweeping Saga of Conservation Stewardship Across America — provides the answers we all seek and need.Having published five books, more than 500 photo-essays, and 5,000 photographs, Budd Titlow lives with his music educator wife, Debby, in San Diego, California.