Bird Sets Flight Record With 7,257-Mile Marathon

Oct. 22, 2008 -- Forgoing layovers and snack stops, a bird known as the bar-tailed godwit has broken the record established for the world's longest known non-stop bird flight, according to a new study.

The honor goes to a female named "E7" that continuously flew 7,257 miles across the Pacific Ocean, breaking the previous record set by a Far-Eastern curlew, who flew 4,038 miles nonstop.

She didn't even glide.

"Bar-tailed godwits use forward flapping flight and seldom ever glide," lead author Robert Gill, Jr., told Discovery News.

Gill, project leader of the shorebird research program at the U.S. Geological Survey, explained that climbing midair while gliding is costly in terms of energy for birds, so continuous wing-flapping surprisingly saves on "fuel."

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He and his team tracked multiple bar-tailed godwits as they flew from their summer breeding grounds in the western Alaska tundra to New Zealand, where they spend the rest of the year. Females were surgically implanted with transmitters, while males, which in this species are smaller and lighter, were affixed with external transmitters.

The migrating birds' flights lasted between five and 9.4 days.

The findings, published in the latest issue of Proceedings of The Royal Society B, suggest that oceans, mountain ranges, deserts, ice fields and other vast, open spaces may not always be barriers to migration, as had previously been thought. Instead, like a fast lane on a low-traffic highway, they might provide some animals with optimal, near hassle-free travel routes.