I live in Christchurch, NZ, and so I see a variety of long distance travellers in the swamplands and estuaries, including bar-tailed godwits at the end of Southshore spit <a href="https://newsline.ccc.govt.nz/news/story/draft-godwits-arrival-heralds-spring" rel="nofollow">https://newsline.ccc.govt.nz/news/story/draft-godwits-arriva...</a><p>A huge amount of housing and infrastructure here wouldn’t be allowed now, because when it was built it would have disrupted rare birds (or perhaps that is why the birds are now rare).<p>It does make one feel more aware of how the world is connected when you realise that migratory birds need to survive stopovers in other countries like China.<p>The birds also need to survive in New Zealand, where just a few signs and some social convention prevents dogs from attacking nesting sites (edit: or people disturbing them), and it would be hard to lock down the area since many people would strongly assert their rights to go there.
According to Wikipedia a godwit weighs ~0.5kg and it flew 7000 miles. If my calculations are right we are looking at 1.5kwh of energy and 0.2 wh per mile?<p>Even if we assume that the bird is almost all fat and fat can store ~3500kcal per pound, the maximum stored energy is 4kwh. That gives us 0.8wh per mile. So we can safely say that the bird spent [1.5-4kwh] to do this trip.<p>Teslas that are very efficient are in the order of 200 wh per mile.<p>What the heck we have a lot of work to do.
I immediately smelled bullshit in the headline because surely they don't mean non-stop in the literal sense. An animal has to eat! But no, I was wrong, these birds fly 8+ days in a row without sleep or food (or a complete mental breakdown, presumably). Though I do find it odd the article doesn't discuss the food and sleep issue more.
People might be interesting in some research from NASA about how Birds fly compared to planes and why they are more efficient.<p>Albion H. Bowers was the Chief Scientist at NASA's Neil A. Armstrong Flight Research Center published some fantastic research:<p>On Wings of the Minimum Induced Drag: Spanload Implications for Aircraft and Birds<p>(<a href="https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20160003578" rel="nofollow">https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20160003578</a>)<p>but here are some videos that get the message across:<p>2014:<p>NASA's Albion H. Bowers - "Why Birds Don't Have Vertical Tails" - AMA EXPO 2014 (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoT2upDbdUg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoT2upDbdUg</a>)<p>2018:<p>"Prandtl Wing Minimum Drag Update" - Al Bowers (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCwtcDNB15E" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCwtcDNB15E</a>)<p>2021:<p>Fly with Birds: Meeting with Albion H. Bowers
(<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6oVXPkTnss" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6oVXPkTnss</a>)<p>We could massively improve our efficiency by adopting this. Its a shame that we are flying as much as we do and using so much unnecessary fuel.
Lovely. My 2yo child really enjoys correctly identifying the Bar-tailed godwit (along with all the other birds) in this wonderfully illustrated book: <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/what-its-like-to-be-a-bird-9781526604125/" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/what-its-like-to-be-a-bird-978...</a><p>So, this title made me smile and think of him :)
I'm constantly astonished by birds. They seem to be the ultimate evolutionary optimisers, which makes sense given their requirements. They seem to be incredibly efficeient with energy, weight and space.<p>It's not just physical feats like this, but the way some of the the corvids pack incredible brains in a volume and mass significantly less than other non-flying animals with roughly similar levels of intellegence (although I appreciate that cross-species intelligence comparisons are always difficult).
The surprising part is that we have a battery that lasts that long for tracking “in real time” and doesn’t weigh the bird down. How’s that possible?<p>The article mentions that is solar-powered, but even then how much power could it generate?
For anyone wanting to fly along with the birds, the movie Winged Migration is truly stunning. It is shot in a very unique way where you really feel as though you're flying with the various birds. (Same director has another great movie called Microcosmos.)<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pc_qpk2d-ao" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pc_qpk2d-ao</a>
As a human being, I find these feats of navigation and stamina astounding.<p>Human beings cannot do anything like this.<p>These birds are awesome.<p>Still, I find it peculiar and somehow off the mark to contextualise one bird's flight as a "world record".<p>In the bird's world, these are ordinary events. The only standout feature of that flight is that no human had witnessed and recorded anything more superlative.<p>It's OK that humans enjoy measuring things and celebrating the longest X or the biggest Y or the fastest Z. As I human, I get that.<p>What's less OK, and somewhat diminishing of the bird's natural majesty, is that if another bird were to fly 2% slower or less far, humans might shrug their shoulders and ask, so what?
Amazing that our state of the art technology is a fragile device that can fly for 30 minutes, while this ancient entity can fly nonstop, deriving energy from bugs and water, fly through storms, self repair any damage, has global navigation and local avoidance, and even can self replicate.<p>It's humbling to realize how far off our technology is in certain areas from competing even with insects.
How does the tracking work? So the birds are carrying a GPS chip? How is the location transmitted back to the researchers? - they are over the pacific for most of the flight
Incredible navigation skills too, though not quite "perfect" the paths seem to have occasionally some fairly large deviations<p>Nature's benchmarks for economy of resources are still so very far ahead from anything human made
Daily Mail seems to have covered a similar journey by this species last year, albeit slightly slower:
<a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8835459/Jet-fighter-godwit-breaks-world-record-non-stop-bird-flight.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8835459/Jet-fighter...</a><p>Still I wouldn’t have known about either without the HN-posted article.
There's an excellent episode of In Our Time from the BBC about bird migrations - absolutely fascinating stuff - <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08wmk5j" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08wmk5j</a>
Tangent: monarch butterflies routinely fly across the Atlantic Ocean, which (given their relatively tiny size and fragility) strikes me as an equivalent feat.
Lots of people trying to compare our 10k-year old technology (200 years if we talk about machines, even less if we talk about robots) with something that evolved basically with billions of trial/errors in millions of years.<p>At this point we should check which animal can travel as fast as a shuttle and go back and forth to the moon.
It may be the longest distance recorded for a continual flight by any land bird, but it's not an extraordinary performance.<p>For instance, common swifts can flight continuously for months. They obviously accumulate a huge distance during this time, even when they're not migrating. They live in Eurasia, from Lisbon to Vladivostok. And they winter in Africa, south of Congo. I think Vladivostok-Harare is a longer trip than Alaska-Australia, but it's probably hard to put sensors on small birds during their migration.
Animal equivalent of ultramarathons. Only difference between animals and human athletes being that animals are doing it on daily basis without trying to beat records or win something.
Meta: The title of this post was different earlier this morning. The change doesn't quite conform to the rules, using a subtitle(?) rather than the actual title. But more interestingly, the bizarre bird name and lack of context actually makes it seem more clickbait-y, not less. Perhaps a title change striving to follow the letter of the law but not the spirit of it?<p>Caveat: I'm not arguing for another change or passing judgment. I just thought the change itself was notable. And bird names are ridiculous.