A bird the size of your fist has made humans all over the world marvel at the things we can’t do. Like fly. For 11 days straight, from Alaska to Tasmania, your toes not touching earth or water. That’s an average of 765 miles each day, enough to tire a long-haul truck driver burning diesel […]
Right about now, songbirds in Brazil are shifting on their perches, feeling mysterious impulses that will soon make them leap off their branches and head toward Alaska. One of these birds is the olive-sided flycatcher, about as tall as your hand, with a blocky body and head. With good fortune, these birds will in a […]
A bar-tailed godwit recently arrived in New Zealand on its second attempt to get there from Alaska, after a storm had blasted it back north. Keith Woodley of the Pukorokoro Miranda Shorebird Centre on the North Island of New Zealand reported that a male godwit carrying a satellite transmitter first left the mudflats near the […]
Pencil-beaked shorebirds with the ability to stay airborne for a week — flying all the way from Alaska to New Zealand — rely on a few crescents of mudflat to fuel that incredible journey. Scientists recently found that almost the entire population of bar-tailed godwits that breed in Alaska fatten up on clams and worms […]