It’s unimaginable to me how some migrating birds can remain airborne for so long. The record varies depending on time and distance.
National Geographic reports that a satellite-tagged female bar-tailed godwit (Limosa lapponica) migrated nonstop across the entire Pacific Ocean: some 7,145 miles from Alaska to New Zealand. That’s without a refueling stop, which means either that the bird didn’t sleep for nine days, or somehow slept on the wing. According to Wikipedia, that’s the longest nonstop flight by any bird, and the longest migration of any animal without pausing for food or drink. Let’s hear it for this intrepid godwit:
Hummingbirds must eat nearly continuously when they’re awake, so it’s amazing that the ruby-throated hummer (Archilochus colubris), during its February migration to the U.S. from Central America, can cross the entire Gulf of Mexico in one go: a 500-mile journey taking 18-22 hours. During that flight, the bird loses 60% of its weight: from 6 grams to 2.5 grams.
On the other hand, LiveScience gives another endurance “record”: “Swift record! Migrating birds fly nonstop for six months.” This refers to the Alpine Swift (Tachymarptis melba), which migrate between Europe/Asia and southern Africa. When I saw the title I was dubious, but the Nature Communications paper documenting it (reference and link at bottom) seems to show that at least one individual was continuously airborne for 200 days (the tagging showed wing flapping and pitch). Not all of that was during migration; the damn things just don’t like to land!
Finally, the CBC reports that in August this year a tagged whimbrel (Numenius phaeopus) named Upinraaq flew four days nonstop, with part of it through a hurricane:
Upinraaq, which means summer in Inuvialuktun, surprised scientists this year when she got caught in Tropical Storm Erica, and survived. In the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, Upinraaq encountered 75 km/h winds.
“This bird flew from Newfoundland, had been flying for three days non-stop, when it hit the northeast quadrant of the storm and then powered through the storm and on to South America,” says Fletcher Smith, a research biologist with Virginia Commonwealth University.
The bird:
and its path:
Another distance record from EarthSky:
The bird that flies farthest is the Arctic Tern [Sterna paradisaea], an elegant white seabird. This bird also sees more daylight than any other.
The Arctic Tern breeds on the shores of the Arctic Ocean in northern hemisphere summer. And it feeds over the oceans of the southern hemisphere half a year later – in southern hemisphere summer. So, like many birds, this bird flies great distances every year to maintain its life of endless summertime.
North American Arctic Terns fly about 40,000 kilometers – or 24,000 miles – each year. That’s a distance about equal to the distance around the Earth.
The article adds that over its lifetime of 25 years or so, a tern can migrate over a million kilometers—three times the distance from the Earth to the Moon!
Hats off to these amazing birds!
h/t: Diane G.
___________
Liechti, F. et al. 2013. First evidence of a 200-day non-stop flight in a bird. Nature Communications, doi:10.1038/ncomms3554
And you thought you had a long commute….
b&
Ha ha & I grumble when I have to walk 1 km, especially if there are a lot of steep hills!
Yes, but is it uphill both ways? Through snowdrifts? 😉
No, that was only in childhood going to school. 😛
Thee were lucky!
When the Godwits arrive here in NZ after their epic flights they cannot fold their wings and spend some time on the beaches they land on, recovering, before they can move and fly normally. An astonishing journey.
They started arriving a couple of weeks ago for the summer I think.
I’ve heard that during warbler “fall-outs” at High Island, Texas, many birds are seen falling out just short of the shore, having not quite made it across the Gulf. Others arrive so exhausted a person can walk right over to them and pick them up.
I know that here, near the south end of Lake Michigan, gulls lurk offshore waiting for tired migrants aiming to come ashore after crossing the length of the lake. A picture of a Herring Gull eating a Hermit Thrush was posted to a bl*g not long ago.
“Hummingbirds must eat nearly continuously when they’re awake, ”
Our Creator should have embedded a small fusion reactor into His creations so that we didn’t have to waste all this time eating. Very inefficient.
My thoughts exactly.
This “sleep” nonsense is annoying, too.
Ceiling Cat invented cooking for that precise purpose. All other apes use a working day just searching for food and eating. [ https://www.ted.com/talks/suzana_herculano_houzel_what_is_so_special_about_the_human_brain ]
Likely helping to enable their great endurance are the fantastic lungs of birds, which sport accessory air sacs that extend into their hollow bones. They can exchange gases through their lungs when they breathe in, like you do, but they also get oxygen from the air sacs as they breathe out.
I thought that the accessory pneumatisation of birds (and by implication, of other theropod dinosaurs) meant that they had continuous one-way ventilation. I.e., except for the mouth/ pharynx, the direction of travel of the air was always in one direction, eliminating the dead spaces of other less derived vertebrate’s ventilation systems.
I seem to remember that that is indeed the case. Yes, this pdf, Avian Respiration, describes avian respiration in detail. Airflow is unidirectional through the lungs such that freshly oxygenated air is always moving through the lungs.
Reading … “Evidence gathered over the past 30 years has breathed new life into the hypothesis [of theropod-bird relationships].” Oh, hardy har har!
I’m still not getting the picture of what goes on clear, to be honest. “This system also keeps the volume of air in the lung nearly constant, a prerequisite for maintaining a level flight path.” Well, if you’re underwater, yes. But in air? The buoyancy forces from changing lung volume are going to be negligible. Indeed, shortly later the article you cite says “Birds compensate for the larger tracheal dead space by having a relatively larger tidal volume and a lower respiratory frequency, approximately one-third that of mammals.” A larger tidal volume (w.r.t. mammals) is going to increase buoyant effects, not decrease them.
OK, I see it now – from the diagram from “Reese et al. 2006” with inhalation going from trachaea to posterior air sacs and through the lungs forward to the several anterior air sacs, then exhalation emptying the posterior air sacs into the anterior ones through the lungs, and the anterior air sacs being emptied through the trachaea.
Hmmm, I think I’ve got it now, but it’s a complex system.
It is complex. I once had saved a link to the most clear explanation of avian breathing I’ve come across, with large well done diagrams, but I can’t find the damn thing!
The link I provided was the result of a quick search and skim after I failed to find my favored link.
Saved a link then lost it. I bet that’s never happened before! Curse of our times.
Amazing! But hey, if I could fly, I wouldn’t want to land either!
We had a holiday bach on a west coast beach south of Auckland NZ and the bar-tailed godwits would gather there. It was a summer treat to see them and knowing the journey they had made, made it very special.
Well someone has to say it. *Ahem*
“I just flew from Alaska to New Zealand, and boy, are my wings tired!”
I’ve done 11 return flights between New Zealand and Hong Kong and some of them felt as if I had gone nine days without sleeping.
I hat long haul flights so much I only did it once (Canada to NZ with a quick plane change in Hawaii). After that, I broke them up and stayed in Hawaii a few days, then grumbled about now I didn’t want to get on the plane & why couldn’t I just stay in Hawaii?
Re the intrepid godwit, I wonder whether it has a genetic variation in its clock machinery. And compared to other godwits, I wonder about its hormone, metabolic, and gene expression profiles.
I’ll also add that outliers are fascinating. Were I a basic scientist, I would look for critters with outlier characteristics if interested in gene discovery.
I suspect that was an average Godwit feat, just a bird that was fitted with a transmitter and survived and was relocated at its destination.
It’s expensive to outfit birds with these instruments, so only a handful have been done so far, IIRC. Thus the odds that this one was an outlier are likely small. 🙂
Isn’t peer review fun? :–)
And Diane G., you are quite sharp.
(I’m not mixing you up this time, so you should let yourself accept the compliment.)
LOL, Charleen!
I just happen to know a bit about birds since birding is my favorite hobby at the moment.
But I’m sharp too, right? 🙂
Ah, yes you are – and warm.
You took a charming photo of a chipmunk butt with beautiful tan tones and frontal blur.
But just a friendly warning–don’t mess with MacPherson. 😉
More quippery :–)
Quite appreciated.
A mentor of sorts of mine died last night, so it is nice to experience light-heartedness mixed into a day of sadness.
I’m so sorry to hear that, Charleen. You have my sympathy.
…especially when bot a glove….
b&
Ha ha
Birds are direct descendants of dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs evolved and got adapted to an environment with way less oxygen than today.
Birds inherited the efficient respiratory system of dinosaurs and they just thrive, in today’s relative abundance of oxygen in the atmosphere.
As these fantastic flight feats clearly demonstrate.
Nope, sorry on the oxygen front. No great variations in the oxygen content of the atmosphere during the “age of the dinosaurs”.
There probably was a temporary decline in atmospheric oxygen at the Permo-Triassic boundary, but that was also probably after the differentiation of the archosaurs (crocs, dinosaurs), the thrapsids (“mammal-like reptiles”, mammals, and somethings else I forget at this moment), and the other rag-bag which we call the “reptiles”.
The major significant excursion in the oxygen content of the Earth’s atmosphere was when the O2 content reached the mid- to high- 20s of percent in the Carboniferous. And wildfires capped that excursion.
I wonder if the birds pull the dolphin trick of sleeping with half a brain at a time.
I wonder how you’d test that?!
wind tunnel?
Hmmmm. I should think that would frighten a bird too much for sleep.
I wouldn’t imagine trying to sleep as an air-breathing animal in the ocean could be any easier.
I suspect they’re more adapted to oceans than birds are to wind tunnels. 😉
What a great post! (Jerry added a whole lot more to the single article I sent him. 🙂 )
In the comments section of the Whimbrel article, it was mentioned that Whimbrels are also game animals, with hunters awaiting their arrival. Being an article more for those interested in birding and science than hunting, some commenters were distressed. As one remarked, referring to the tagged bird, “one person’s doctoral thesis is another person’s lunch.”
OTOH, the central clearinghouse for bird band reporting receives much of its data on certain species from hunters; apparently they’re very good at calling/emailing in the band numbers of the birds they shoot.
A local (SW Michigan, or the SE shore of Lake Michigan) bird-blogger took a picture of a banded Piping Plover this July at the lakeshore and emailed in the number. In a few days he received the information that the bird had been banded in North Dakota and was only about seven weeks old!
How would a bird get water while airborne for 200 days? Since they live on insects, I doubt they get enough water from them. Wikipedia just says “they drink on the wing” without further explanation. Relying on rain seems unlikely. Does anyone know?
Many birds are capable of getting nearly all the water they need from their food, and I’d suspect insectivores do better on that account than seed-eaters. 🙂
But I found this in Wikipedia about Chimney Swifts (which return to roosts every night, so not all that similar):
Both Common Swifts Apus apus and Alpine Swifts will briefly skim the water surface to drink but they seem to do this much less commonly than, say swallows, in my experience. They are also supposed to be able to take on water by catching raindrops and, as Diane points out, will also acquire a significant proportion of their water requirements via the insects they eat.
In common with other swift species, these two species have very long wings relative to body size and very short legs which mean that if grounded they are unable to get airborne again and I would guess that this may instill a preference for avoiding drinking from water bodies if possible. (Their nests are usually high up in buildings or on crags and cliffs which allows them to get airborne simply by diving out of the nest).
Several photos of swifts drinking on this page: http://www.swift-conservation.org/PhotoGallery..htm
The link doesn’t work without the double dot before htm, but you can’t click on it from the comments here. As it says, swallows can drink by landing next to water, but swifts can’t.
Ah, knowing that, all I had to do was click on your link and then add the “..htm” in the address window.
What a wonderful page! Super photography and a wealth of Swift info. Highly recommended!
Thanks for the information. 🙂 My first thought is that they’re obstinately doing things the hard way, but if they’re no good on their feet as Jonathan says I guess it’d explain why they prefer to smack themselves into the water… 😛
I think you’d really enjoy the page MR posted a link to–note the modification necessary.
These migratory flights are amazing and birds have a stupendous capacity to store fat to fuel such flights. Pre-migratory shore-birds may carry 30% or more of their total body weight as fat, for example.
Of course not all shorebirds migrate in a single long distance flight like the bar-tailed godwit recorded flying from Alaska to New Zealand but undergo a staged migration with feeding stops at wetlands along the way. Wetland ‘reclamation’ is one of the most serious threats facing many species. One such is the Spoon-billed Sandpiper Eurynorhynchus pygmeus – perhaps the most threatened shorebird species f all – which has been reduced to a wild population believed to be less than 100 pairs, through a combination of illegal hunting and loss of wetland habitat along the east Asian flyway.
Plus, of course, they do things like re-sorbing unnecessary organs down to minimal sizes. Like their guts, their gonads …
Then re-grow them at the other end of the journey.
Indeed. Anyone interested can find out a bit about the physiological and morphological adaptations in sections 7(c) (which even mentions the Bar-tailed Godwit) and 8 here:
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/363/1490/287.short
Fascinating!
I’m slightly surprised that the bird didn’t seem to make any effort to fly around the hurricane, given that they’re not exactly insensitive to air conditions.
Or maybe they just flew high enough to not particularly be bothered by the turbulence. Some species of Asian geese migrate above Everest/ Chomolungma, so it’s within the range of possibilities.
What always amazes me is watching our feathered cousins eat – it always seems they are eating so little, even giant ones like Canada geese.
What amazes me is how huge flocks can gather and persist in one area for a while. If I were a farmer trying to feed them I’d need hundreds of pounds of feed, but somehow they find what they need in nature. Geese, of course, can graze, but in snow?
It’s also amazing how birds like chickadees seem to find food on the deadest of branches in winter. And to think of how small the individual food items must be.