Topic: The longest flight

[erik]

The Times

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article1599708.ece

April 2, 2007

The flight of the godwit

World record 6,000 miles in seven days – without stopping

A wispy shore bird dear to the hearts of New Zealanders has claimed an extraordinary record on its way to find a mate, the longest recorded nonstop flight.

The female bar-tailed godwit, known as E7 by the scientists monitoring a tiny tracking device implanted under her skin, departed the Coromandel Peninsular in New Zealand around midnight on March 17. She landed exhausted in the early evening a week later on the mudflats of Yalu Jiang in North Korea.

She had travelled exactly 10,205 kilometres (6,341 miles) at an average speed of 56 km/h (35mph) and at altitudes of up to two kilometres. Nonstop.

Along with three others that arrived about the same time, she had flown day and night, north across the Tasman Sea between New Zealand and Aus-tralia, east of Papua New Guinea and north again past the island of Guam into the mouth of the Yellow Sea and on to North Korea.

Most of the godwits arriving in Korea will have weighed less than 300 grams on landing, having burnt half their body weight in the week or more of flying.

For the next five or six weeks the birds will stay in the Kore-an mudflats, resting and eating to ready themselves for the last leg of their journey – a mere 5,000km to their Alaskan breeding grounds, which entails a journey along the Russian coast and then across the Bering Strait.

Phil Battley, an ecologist at Massey University in New Zealand, was in Korea yesterday tracking the birds. He said that it had long been suspected that godwits flew great distances without stopping – but now scientists had the proof. No other bird had shown such endurance, he said.

“There is no evidence they did anything except fly,” said Dr Battley, a co-ordinator of the tracking project which is being funded by the US as part of its research into the links between migratory birds and the spread of avian flu.

Satellite tracking devices were implanted in the female godwits in an air sac just below the tail with an antenna in the abdominal wall. They act like an aircraft flight data recorder, allowing scientists not only to see where and when the birds land but view to their exact flight paths. Each tag costs about £1,800.

The summer godwit population in New Zealand is believed to be about 70,000. The birds make their first journeys to Alaska – where they breed – when they are four or five years old and after that they continue to make the flights throughout their lives. One godwit being tracked on the journey north is estimated to be 15 years old, which means it has probably logged some 250,000 air miles in its adult life.

In June, godwit eggs will be hatching in Alaska and the chicks will set out for New Zealand when they are ten to twelve weeks old. They will take a more direct route – southwest across the Pacific – arriving in September.

Bar-tailed godwits can also be spotted in the British Isles during the winter. They start arriving in coastal areas in October and tend to live in peat bogs and swamps. Their normally chestnut plumage turns a grey-brown colour during the winter and they are recognis-able for their spectacularly long bills, which they dip into the mud to collect worms.

These godwits migrate from Scandinavia through the Baltic and North seas. Their East Siberian and Alaskan siblings winter in South East Asia and Australasia.

The godwit’s closest rival for long-distance flying is the Arctic tern, which undertakes a 19,000 km (12,000mile) round trip from pole to pole each year. Spending summer in the northern hemisphere and winter in the southern hemisphere ensures the terns see more daylight than any other creature on the planet.

Another astonishing long-dis-tance flyer is the willow warbler. With a wingspan of just 16 to 22cm and weighing between 7 and 12 grams, you could fit perhaps half a dozen of them in your cupped hands. Yet they fly between Britain and southern Africa every year.

The godwit has held a special place in New Zealand literature since the melancholic writer, Robin Hyde, who fled New Zealand for England in 1938, wrote The Godwit’s Fly, a book pondering why the brightest New Zealanders so often took off for England. She wrote: “Later she thought, most of us here are human godwits; our north is mostly England. Our youth, our best, our intelligent, brave and beautiful must make the long migration, under a compulsion they hardly understand.”

Hyde, too, found her way back to New Zealand after the book was published to critical acclaim. But she was broken by illness, money worries and literary disappointments. She died by her own hand in 1939.

[daphne]

Amazing!