I had never heard of the delightfully named Hudsonian godwit before this piece—yet, given their achievements, they deserve global fame. These slight, mudflat-loving shorebirds hold the record for the longest nonstop flight, clocking journeys of seven thousand miles or more that one scientist deems “technically impossible.” Rivka Galchen follows researchers from Patagonian mudflats to Alaskan bogs as they try to understand the biology behind these incredible flights. Along the way, she even gets to hold one of our little celebrities, an “otherworldly and wondrous” experience.
Migratory shorebirds are usually not a person’s first bird crush. They lack the supernatural aura of the resplendent quetzal, and they don’t go in for outlandish mating displays like that of the prairie chicken. As the Princeton University biology professor and shorebird-lover David Wilcove put it, migratory shorebirds can give an impression of being “little brown guys, buzzing around in the mud, not too big and not too small, and, whether one is a stint or a phalarope or a knot or a godwit, they’re just kind of there.” And yet, Wilcove told me, they are a birder’s kind of bird. Once people get to know them, they tend to fall in love.
More picks on birds
The Pollycrisis
“Feral parakeets flock to London.”
Death by a Thousand Dams
“Tens of thousands of small barriers hamper fish recovery in the northeastern United States.”
She Died at the San Diego Border. A Surveillance Camera Was in Plain Sight.
“In Southern California’s Otay Mountain Wilderness, the federal surveillance network seems unavoidable. But year after year, migrant deaths persist.”
On Loving Birds
“A couple of years after I began volunteering, I realized I was hell-bent on healing birds because they, too, had healed me—in more ways than one.”
The Lucrative Bird-Singing Contests That Are Pushing Species to the Brink
“Millions of songbirds in Southeast Asia are trapped and smuggled each year for keeping as pets or entering in competitions. Scientists warn that it’s fueling a crisis.”
Are Crows Really Our Friends?
“An investigation into the state of corvid–human relations.”
