[Maine-birds] Recent ornithological literature: Arctic Terns fly record distances

Arctic Terns were already known to fly record distances, being the long-distance champions before we knew about shorebirds, like the famous Red Knot B95. That knot is now called moonbird because he has been tracked over 20 years to have flown as far as the moon and at least halfway back during annual migrations (see this article by Manomet Center for Conservation Science: http://www.manomet.org/iconic-red-knot-b95-resighted-delaware-bay). I wrote about the physiological feats of shorebird migrants last year for Midcoast Maine Audubon and how some fly nonstop over the middle of oceans to reach their destinations. (Article here: http://www.midcoastaudubon.org/newsletters/Bulletin_aug_2012.pdf)

Those flights are impressive, but a recent paper in the journal Ardea reports the flight tracks of five Arctic Terns from colonies in the Netherlands suggesting even longer flights over a lifetime are possible. Using geolocators, light-weight data loggers that record sun angle and time, researchers found that the total travel distances during the non-breeding period for each tern was 90,000 km +/- 2000 km (about 56,000 miles each year). Given the oldest known breeding Arctic Tern is 34 yrs-old, a 20 yr-old bird like B95 could have flown the distance to the moon and back 6 times and be halfway back on its 7th roundtrip this year.

The total distance flown by these birds over the non-breeding period includes flights within staging and wintering areas. The total migration distances are still impressive, being 48,700 km. It terns out these birds don't fly straight down and back. Instead, they stage in the central North Atlantic, then move south to the Benguela Current off e. South Africa, then fly to another staging area in the central-southern Indian Ocean, and finally spend the winter in the region of Wilkes Land off e. Antarctica. One bird flew as far as New Zealand. An abstract of this paper is here: http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.5253/078.101.0102

The most recent issue of The Auk features several papers on these and other new technologies to track and understand migrant birds. Next time you see a shorebird or a migrant tern, or any of our Neotropical migrants, I hope stories like this move you to act strongly in their defense and amazing feats. By the way, if there are 4 million Arctic Terns, a rough estimate of the world population, then about 500 tons of terns are moving back and forth across our globe each year.

Louis Bevier
Fairfield

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