The Bird That Can Fly For Ten Days Nonstop

A bar-tailed godwit.

The bar-tailed godwit is a species of bird that can fly for longer and farther than what most people may think. For years, scientists have been studying this bird because it flies from Alaska to New Zealand every year. To put it into perspective, that is a distance of over 7,000 miles! That’s a pretty long trip for a bird that weighs less than a pound before it takes off. People who track birds didn’t believe it at first, but in 2021, they saw a godwit that flew for 11 days straight. This article explains how it does that, what the bird does to get ready, and why scientists find it worth studying.

This bird, scientifically known as Limosa lapponica, belongs to the sandpiper family.  The Limosa lapponica is part of a group called L. l. baueri, which breeds in Alaska during the summer. These birds are not big and are only about 15 inches long, with wings that stretch to 30 inches. Before the trip, they weigh between 0.6 and 1 pound, but prior to leaving, they bulk up a lot. In July and August, before migrating, they eat worms and insects in Alaska’s muddy tundra, and by September, they double their weight to around 1.2 pounds. Most of this weight increase, however, is purely as a result of excess fat. That fat is what keeps them alive during the week-long flight, since they don’t eat or drink anything during that time.

The flight itself starts in western Alaska, usually from the Yukon Delta, and ends in New Zealand’s coastal areas, including the Bay of Plenty. Scientists know all of this information through the tiny solar-powered satellite tags that they attach to these birds. In October 2021, a male godwit with the tag “4BBRW” left Alaska on the 13th and landed in New Zealand on the 24th, and in total, the trip was 11 days and 1 hour long. Don’t forget that this was nonstop flying, since it’s just water for miles and miles once you leave Alaska. When scientists looked into the recordings, the tag showed that this specific godwit had flown 7,581 miles, which is the longest nonstop trip ever recorded for any bird. The bird had moved at speeds between 30 and 37 miles per hour, and strong winds from the Aleutian Low system had pushed it along even faster at times, hitting as high as 55 miles per hour.

But how does a bird do this? Well, it’s all about the body composition and mechanics of the bar-tailed godwit. The fat that it stores in its body makes up more than half its weight, and it burns about 0.41% of that fat every hour while flying. Even more impressive, its stomach and liver shrink to save energy, while its heart and flight muscles grow bigger to handle the intense workload. These specific characteristics of the godwit allow for oxygen to flow and be used more efficiently. Scientists also think that it doesn’t sleep like we do; instead, it might rest half its brain at a time while the other half keeps it flying. This is called unihemispheric sleep, and it’s something birds and sea animals use a lot. Nobody has ever caught one of these birds’ entire journey on camera, but the tags show they never stop moving.

The route is another reason this flight stands out. The godwit flies over the Pacific Ocean, not touching land once. It takes off in Alaska, goes southwest, and crosses open water until it reaches New Zealand. Since there’s no place to land, the bird has to keep going. Wind helps a lot here as well because the Aleutian Low, as mentioned before brings steady gusts that push the bird along. Scientists with the Global Flyway Network and the U.S. Geological Survey have tracked these flights since 2006. They’ve seen other long trips too, like one in 2007 that went 7,258 miles, but the 2021 record beat them all. Some birds even do this every year, logging thousands of miles over their lives.