Bird flies 13 500km without stopping

A YOUNG bar-tailed godwit appears to have set a non-stop distance record for migratory birds by flying at least 13 560km from Alaska to the Australian state of Tasmania.

The bird was tagged as a hatchling in Alaska during the Northern Hemisphere summer with a tracking GPS chip and tiny solar panel that enabled an international research team to follow its first annual migration across the Pacific Ocean, Birdlife Tasmania convenor Eric Woehler said yesterday. Because the bird was so young, its gender wasn’t known.

Aged about 5 months, it left Alaska on October 13 and touched down 11 days later at Ansons Bay, Tasmania, according to data from Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Ornithology.

The bird started on a southwestern course toward

Japan then turned southeast over Alaska’s

Aleutian Islands.

It was again tracking southwest when it flew over or near Kiribati and New Caledonia, then past the Australian mainland before turning west for Tasmania.

“Whether this is an accident, whether this bird got lost or whether this is part of a normal pattern of migration for the species, we still don’t know,” said Woehler.

Guinness World Records lists the longest recorded non-stop flight by a bird as 12 200km by a male bar-tailed godwit flying from Alaska to New Zealand in 2020. | AP