<\/a>The track shows a juvenile bar-tailed godwit’s route as it took off from Southwest Alaska on Oct. 13, 2022, and arrived 11 days later in Tasmania. (Courtesy Image \/ Jesse Conklin)<\/p><\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
On July 15, 2022, biologists captured and loosely fitted a three-week old chick with a tiny transmitter. They knew the godwit would inflate to three times its size by the time it was ready to leap off the Alaska mud.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
Bar-tailed godwits are creatures not thought about by most people. They fly over vast, lonely oceans to nest invisibly within bumps of tundra vegetation.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
Months later, after poking their pencil bills into mud to gorge on clams and other small things, they disappear from Alaska during storms that drive us to our tents. The next year, they reappear as a surprise, skittering to a landing on soft tundra in April after traveling from New Zealand to Asia and past Japan, the Kamchatka Peninsula and the sweep of the Aleutian Islands. The birds have done this for thousands of years.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
Two biologists cupped this wonder of a bird gently in their hands last July before its first migration into the unknown.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
Jesse Conklin and Dan Ruthrauff had a plan to do something different this year in researching a bird whose migration was already the stuff of legend; in fall of 2007, scientists saw that one had flown directly — in eight days — from Alaska to New Zealand. The young bird that just landed in Tasmania went much farther in one go.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
To find out exactly what that bird did, Conklin and Ruthrauff in summer 2022 upped the difficulty of already tedious rubber-boot fieldwork. They wanted to find godwits born this year, rather than adult birds that are larger, easier to fit with a transmitter and more likely to survive the monitoring period.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
“We had conducted breeding studies before on the Yukon (River) Delta and it was pretty demoralizing,” said Ruthrauff, who works for the USGS Alaska Science Center in Anchorage. “We expended a huge field effort to find very few nests, all of which were depredated before they hatched.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
“But, when godwit nests hatch, the adults very aggressively defend their broods and are quite easy to catch using recorded playbacks of chick calls. We thought that if we just put ourselves in a situation to find just-hatching nests that we might have some luck.”<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
The men captured three juvenile bar-tailed godwits — balls of fluff not able to fly at such a young age — and fitted each with a backpack transmitter powered by a solar panel the size of a postage stamp.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
The transmitters fell off two growing birds in the days following, but the device stayed with one bird. That bird’s transmitter blipped a signal to a satellite every few hours during its fall migration, revealing the nonstop flight from Alaska to Tasmania.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t