Bruce M. Beehler is a naturalist and author. His most recent book is “Flight of the Godwit: Tracking Epic Shorebird Migrations.”
Could anything be more humbling to the puffed-up human race than the abilities of a young sandpiper named B6?
Many of us find animal achievements fascinating, especially stunning feats of migration and navigation. We are awed by southbound autumn travels of monarch butterflies flying from New England to their winter retreat in Mexico. Or the young male mountain lion that trekked from Black Hills of South Dakota to Connecticut in search of a territory. Or the travels of Chinook salmon, born in a mountain stream in Idaho and growing to adulthood in the depths of the Pacific Ocean off the Aleutian Islands.
It turns out that some animal migration is more fantastic than we knew, thanks to recent studies of super-migrators, peripatetic members of the sandpiper family. The most familiar of these super-migrators is the sanderling, the little white sandpiper we see chasing waves along our Mid-Atlantic beaches in late summer. This bird nests above the Arctic Circle and winters in the far Southern Hemisphere, stopping to rest and feed on coastlines along the way.
But the superstar is a large and rarely seen sandpiper — the bar-tailed godwit.
In 2022, a young godwit code-named “B6” that hatched in western Alaska set the record for longest known sustained avian flight. After being fitted with a two-ounce satellite transmitter, the young bird was tracked flying south across the Pacific, finally veering sharply westward to land safely on Tasmania. This bird traveled 8,321 miles over 264 hours of flight — that’s 11 days, without touching down on water or land, without anything to eat or drink.
How can an animal weighing less than two pounds sustain such effort? And how does it “know” where to travel?
The physiology of this feat is only imperfectly understood. Before departing Alaska, the godwit doubles its weight by adding fat stores, and it greatly reduces the mass of those internal organs not needed for the journey. It is able to generate water to keep its system functioning by burning its protein and fat. Somehow it finds favorable winds by adjusting its flight altitude, at times ascending to nearly 20,000 feet. Does this godwit sleep during this long flight? Some scientists believe the birds can alternate shutting down half their brains while the other half remains awake.
But here is the big mystery: A four-month-old godwit born and raised in Alaska must somehow “know” where to go for the winter. And it does not follow its parents, who migrate before the nestlings are physically ready for the trip. Instead, young godwits gather and repeat the adults’ flight south. To do this, the birds have to possess a hardwired program to guide them on this maiden flight. It is evident that these young super-migrators possess a capacity akin to the GPS of a smartphone. How is that possible?
Scientists have some ideas. Incoming photons striking the migrating bird’s retina create a phenomenon called “quantum entanglement,” in which molecules of a pigment known as cryptochrome 1a come to share electrons (they are known as “radical pairs”). Because these radical pairs of cryptochrome 1a have a magnetic polarity, they seem to allow a migrating bird to “see” Earth’s magnetic field lines linking the two poles. Moreover, the bird appears to also be able to gauge magnetic inclination (the dip of the magnetic field lines when approaching the pole) and intensity, which allows it to determine its latitude.
But what about the more difficult matter of determining longitude, which plagued human navigators for centuries until they had access to accurate shipborne timepieces? Here is one possibility. The migrating bird uses its own accurate internal clock and its ability to determine true north and south by stellar orientation in combination with its mysterious quantum powers to determine its longitude.More research is needed on this front.
Yes, it’s hard to fathom, but consider the evidence of that sharp right turn carried out by godwit B6 on its maiden flight. After traveling some 8,000 miles southward, it was off course, about 500 miles east of her Tasmanian wintering ground. But instead of continuing southward, which would mean exhaustion and certain death, the tracking device captured B6 making a sharp turn westward at just the right spot, supporting the notion that these birds can accurately determine longitude as well as latitude.
Why does a super-migrator carry out this death-defying migration twice a year? That one’s easier. It’s to spend its life in perpetual spring and summer, when days are long, weather benign, food abundant and threats reduced. Yes, many yearling migrants must perish on their first long flight south, selecting out the nonperformers. But those that make their first trip back north can live as many as 28 years and migrate more than 300,000 miles in a lifetime, about 60,000 miles farther than the moon. Apparently, natural selection took a long-shot evolutionary bet that has produced a winner.
Given the state of the world, we humans shouldn’t need another reason to be more humble about ourselves, but even a quantum physicist who is also an Iron Man aficionado could only marvel at the bar-tailed godwit. We live in a time of tech wonders, but science still can’t fully explain how a young bird leaps across the Pacific on its very first migratory flight. There is much left to learn about the world.
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