This juvenile crossed the Pacific on its very first migration.
In 2022, a hatch-year Bar-tailed Godwit known as B6 flew 13,560 kilometres from Alaska to Tasmania in about eleven days without landing or feeding. It had never completed the route before.
B6_FLIGHT_REPLAY.EXE
🛫ALASKATASMANIA
TRACK STATUSKigigak Island · Oct 13
ELAPSED FLIGHT TIME0sDISTANCE REPLAYED0 km
Reconstructed from the published satellite-track map and project report; intermediate coordinates and timing are approximate. Basemap: Natural Earth / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
WHY THIS BIRD MATTERS
A record flight still depends on somewhere safe to land.
On their northbound return, Alaska-breeding godwits depend on a small network of Yellow Sea tidal flats to rest and refuel. Reclamation and degradation can turn those staging sites into a flyway bottleneck.
The nonstop record is the southbound leg. The Yellow Sea conservation story belongs to the birds’ northbound return.
🌎
TURN WONDER INTO ACTION
See the fieldwork, meet the researchers, or support bird science.
Departure-ready Alaska godwits have been found carrying extraordinary fat reserves alongside unusually small digestive organs. Researchers proposed that long-distance migrants temporarily reduce metabolic machinery they do not need in the air.
That story needs a caveat: later analysis found that age, structural development, and total lean mass may explain part of the difference. The evidence supports remarkable body flexibility—not the tidy meme that B6 simply digested its own organs.
