Bird flaps wings for 9 days non-stop

A wading bird has spent more than nine continuous days in the air to cross the Pacific, without ceasing to flap. Bar-tailed godwits fly from Alaska to Australia and southern hemisphere islands each year to breed and this has now been shown to be without stopping. Nine of the birds, Limosa lapponica baueri, were fitted with electronic tags before flying between 4,355 miles (7,009 km) and 7,258 miles, depending on the route.



They took from six to nine days. The bird that flew for nine days covered 6,230 miles to reach the Solomon Islands. The study, reported in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, was carried out by an international team of scientists. “This far surpassed previous maximum flight-range estimates for birds with flapping flight,” they said.