The Godwit they call E7

Some of you may have heard, though many of you probably haven't, of a Bar-tailed Godwit called E7. This bird has made international news not once, but twice this year. She is part of a satellite tracking program aimed at following the remarkable migration that many species of Australian and New Zealand shorebirds undertake, from the southern hemisphere all the way to Siberia and Alaska, and then back again.

The story of the migration is one of the most fascinating that can be found in nature, and I will be adding a section to this website to tell it at some point. For now just understand that these birds are the marathon runners of the animal kingdom, and until recently we had only suspected how true that was.

The story of E7 began in New Zealand. She was trapped and fitted with a satellite tracking device in February at the Firth of Thames in Miranda. This gave her roughly a month to get used to the device in preparation for her long journey north.

On March 17th, she began a flight with a group of other godwits that would last nearly eight days, and covered ten thousand kilometres; 10,219km to be exact - a world record for the longest single migration leg ever recorded. This brought her to Yalu Jiang in China, where she stayed for over a month, refueling for the next stage of her trip.

In comparison to the Australia-China leg, the China-Alaska leg seems almost tame, a mere 6,459km over four days. Her eventual destination was Manokinak in Alaska, where she is believed to have nested, the goal of this massive feat of endurance. Her total journey north was a staggering 17,456kms, but this was not news. We already knew that godwits traveled from New Zealand through China to Alaska. We knew about the distance.

It was the next stage that we were unsure about. It had been suggested that Bar-tailed Godwits might, just maybe, on the return journey fly directly across the Pacific Ocean. The reasoning was that fewer birds were seen on the return journey than on they journey north. The subspecies of Bar-tailed Godwit that visits Alaska and New Zealand, race baueri, is larger and stores more fat than their western cousins, race menzbieri, who visit Western Australia and Siberia. What could this size difference be attributed to? One possibility was a trans-Pacific flight, but there was no way of knowing, because all our other information was gained from catching them on the ground, i.e. after they'd stopped flying. To prove a trans-Pacific route you would have to be with them the whole way, and with satellite technology we finally could be.

And so on the 30th of August, 2007, E7 left Alaska from Cape Avinof and began what would prove to be an eight and a half day flight, covering over eleven thousand kilometres. She crossed the Pacific Ocean without stopping, covering 11,570km in one go. She smashed her previous record by over 1000kms and confirmed an unproven, slightly crazy theory about just how amazing these birds really are. Her total journey was 29,181km.

If you want to see for yourself the path that E7 flew, along with the other birds in the tracking program, this website has a map, and a link to a Google Earth file that maps out the whole journey.

Chris