Godwit

Hmm.

This is the way of the bar-tailed Godwit, G-O-D-W-I-T, Godwit, G-O-D-W-I-T, from Alaska to New Zealand.

It holds the record for the largest non-stop flight of any bird, flying for over 11,000 kilometers, 6,835 miles without rest.

That is amazing.

So everybody started making their way over.

but I think a lot of people missed it Bernie got it again I was telling him where it was and it eventually went down to the mud and off to the edge of the shore and I think it was seen as a bit of an alien invader because it went out wading amongst the Godwits and the Redshank and it was having scuffles with both and the Godwits and the common Redshank were not scuffling amongst each other but they were this Redshank so there's a hierarchy and I remember all the way back from when I was a kid when there was I saw a budgerigar in our local flats flying around and it was being chased by sparrows and I was talking to someone about it they said oh yeah the sparrows will kill it because it's like an alien it's unusual it's different I went oh and that always stuck with me and apparently that happens yeah if any pets get if any pets are escaped they're generally killed by yeah local magpies, crows, any flocks of birds.

So I just thought that was going to be the case.

But it wasn't there the next day.

They land considerably lighter than when they took off.

Many arriving shorebirds seem to be tired, the ornithologist and conservationist Joseph Archibald Hagar wrote in his foundational monograph, Nesting of the Hudsonian Godwit at Churchill, Manitoba, from 1966.

In a field diary entry, Hagar describes a group of birds that Within a minute or two, dropped into some sunny spot out of the wind, tucked heads into scapulars, and went to sleep, not to move again for as long as we watched.

In 1976, the young ornithologist Robert Gill took a job with the U.S.

He told me, In Alaska, where the seasons are so prominent, it's very dramatic.

It feels like all the birds turn up over the course of one weekend in May.

Along with Godwits, the peninsula was a summer home to yellowlegs, dowitchers, sandpipers, arctic terns, and other species.

But almost no one was aware that so many birds relied on this land.