Somewhere out there on the mudflats of Tasmania is an avian super-star – a shorebird capable of flying non-stop for 13,560 kilometres.
A bar-tailed godwit, merely named 23464, has beaten the world record for non-stop flight on an epic journey from Alaska to Tasmania.
The flight of the godwit was tracked over an 11-day period as it crossed the Pacific to land at its final destination in Anson Bay, north-east Tasmania. As revealed by the satellite tracking device attached to the bird’s body, it made the journey without touching land.
Although record flights by bar-tailed godwits have been recorded before, this is the first to land in our own backyard – we can claim this remarkable record-breaker, the king of endurance, as Tassie’s own.
The godwit, which set off on October 16, beat the previous record set last year by a bird reaching New Zealand, which flew 500 less kilometres.
The new record breaker was attached with a tracking device at Mt William National Park in Alaska shortly after it fledged during the northern summer. According to data from the bird tracking project of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, the godwit took a route to the west of Hawaii, continuing over open ocean and flying over the Pacific island nation of Kiribati on 19 October.
About two days later the bird would have seen land again, flying over Vanuatu and continuing south taking a track about 620km east of Sydney and continuing between Australia’s east coast and New Zealand. Then the godwit took a sharp right and headed west towards Tasmania.
The juvenile bird would have flown without the support of its parents because juveniles leave later, enabling them to build the same store of fat as their parents, the surplus fat used to fuel energy during their epic journeys. In all probability, the super-flyer flew in a flock.
Bar-tailed godwits (Limosa lapponica) have remarkable body adaptations which provide for long-distance flight. They are able to shrink their organs before departure to make room for extra fat in their bodies. Like all birds, they have super-efficient hearts and lungs to power flight. The bodies are also super light, the bones made of a honeycomb-like structure to reduce weight.
The new record, however, is bitter-sweet for Tasmanian birdwatchers because the godwit’s amazing feat comes against a backdrop of catastrophic decreases in the numbers of shorebirds arriving in the state along what is known as the East Asian-Australasian flyway.
In recent years two shorebird species reaching Tasmania, the eastern curlew and the curlew-sandpiper, have been declared critically endangered.
The previous record holder turned up at the Pukorokoro Miranda Shorebird Centre on New Zealand’s north island and volunteers there are wondering what to do with their merchandise celebrating the feat.
“We’ve been blown out of the water by this young upstart,” joked a spokesman.