A bar-tailed Godwit that’s just touched down in New Zealand has made the longest flight by a land bird ever recorded
The female, named 4BYWW, travelled without stopping from Alaska to New Zealand, covering 12 200 kilometres in 8 days and 12 hours at an average speed of 59 kilometres per hour.
After touching down in Firth of Thames, a bay in New Zealand’s North Island, Pukorokoro Miranda Shorebird Centre manager Keith Woodley, who has been monitoring the bird’s migration, told local broadcaster RNZ about the remarkable feat.
The bar-tailed godwit species is known for taking this non-stop flight over the Pacific Ocean. A previous record holder, a male godwit dubbed 4BBRW made the same flight exactly a year ago travelling almost the same distance in 11 days. The previous longest recorded non-stop flight by a bird, of 11,680km, was recorded in 2007.
Dr Jesse Conklin, from the Global Flyway Network, told the Guardian: “They seem to have an onboard map. “They are flying over open ocean for days and days in the mid-Pacific; there is no land at all. Then they get to New Caledonia and Papua New Guinea where there are quite a few islands and, we might be anthropomorphising, but it really looks like they start spotting land and sort of think: ‘Oh, I need to start veering or I will miss New Zealand’.”
Picture: Wikimedia Commons
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