The bartailed godwit will be sampled this spring.
The East Asian-Australasian Flyway (EAAF) stretches from central Siberia to Alaska, down through Asia and across the Pacific to Australia and New Zealand. Holding around 7 million shorebirds, it is one of the smaller of the world’s major flyways, but is poorly known and highly threatened through reclamation on the staging grounds. This site highlights the research into the biology of migratory shorebirds being undertaken at the southern end of the flyway, in New Zealand….
Tracking the world’s greatest migrant: how long does it take Bar-tailed Godwits to cross the Pacific?
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Eastern Bar-tailed Godwits are arguably the world’s greatest migrant. Several lines of evidence suggest that birds refuelling in Alaska may migrate direct to New Zealand and eastern Australia across the Pacific Ocean, but there is as yet no direct evidence for this flight. An international effort is seeking to use radio-tracking during southward migration in 2005 to determine how long it takes godwits to travel from Alaska to New Zealand….This is the personal site of Phil Battley, and its focus is on Northern Hemisphere migrants rather than New Zealand’s indigenous breeding shorebirds.
http://www.nzshorebirds.com/intro.html
Read the Young Naturalist Award winner,
Kolea Watch Project
http://www.hawaiinaturecenter.org/ kolea/index.html
Site Search Tags: Samoa, maps, Hawai’i, Pacific, migration, Kolea, Aotearoa, New+Zealand
This is an interesting point, scary for the birds. I forgot that cumulative stressors would also affect the birds. We have fewer and fewer birds right around my place because people have been less and less caring about how they live (filling in wetlands; driving too fast; adding salt to keep road dust down; trashing the tundra from off-trail snowmobile traffic, etc.)
I’ve been trying to find a good summary of why people should stay healthy (in general, but especially when facing any pandemic). My 3 things everyone should know about bird flu are–
* Katrina was no Girl Scout (be prepared);
* learn the words and tune to Happy Birthday (wash hands while singing two rounds of Happy B-day); and
* practice safe sex (which implies that one has enough respect for self and other not to abuse alcohol and drugs, too. The result is fewer chronic illnesses like untreated depression; chlamydia, TB, and hepatitis which weakens one’s immune system.)