A young bar-tailed godwit appears to have set a non-stop distance record for migratory birds by flying at least 8,435 miles from Alaska to the Australian state of Tasmania.
Bar-tailed godwits stand on the beach at Marion Bay in Australia's Tasmania state on Feb. 17, 2018. , a bird expert said Friday, Oct. 28, 2022. 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. Because the bird was so young, its gender wasn’t known.
The bird was again tracking southwest when it flew over or near Kiribati and New Caledonia, then past the Australian mainland before turning directly west for Tasmania, Australia's most southerly state. The satellite trail showed it covered 13,560 kilometers without stopping. The same bird broke its own record with a 13,000-kilometer flight on its next migration last year, researchers say. But Guinness has yet to acknowledge that feat.