Natures wonders: Bird Migration (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, March 20, 2021, 22:44 (1342 days ago) @ David Turell

Recent studies of the longest ones:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/something-in-the-air-books-on-bird-migration-11616163225?p...

"Mr. Unwin devotes several pages of descriptive text to each of the 67 species mentioned in his book. The subjects, for the most part, all share a common feature: They are large and strong enough to be fitted with tracking units. Thus unfolds a collection of species-specific accounts of birds, from albatrosses to orioles, from the Canadian Arctic to Patagonia and from China to Africa to Australasia, that emphasizes the central fact of each one’s life history: the incredible migratory journey these birds must make. Migration is hazardous and stopover sites are precious, so land conservation is tightly wound into the narrative.

"Solar-powered transmitters using cellular networks can now record a bird’s latitude, longitude and altitude at 30-second intervals. From this cascade of information we’ve learned, for instance, that a fledgling Atlantic puffin leaves its burrow in the dead of night, even before it can fly. Forging into the cold ocean, the chicks feed themselves, alone at sea for three to four years before making landfall. They’re 8 years old before they begin to breed. In 2004, a tracking device revealed that a gray-headed albatross maintained an average flight speed of 78.9 mph for eight hours as it soared, rigid-winged, homeward on the wind with a gullet full of food for its chick. Trackers have revealed common swifts never touching earth—sleeping on the wing—for a documented 10-month period.

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"Twenty years ago, scientists employing some of the first miniaturized satellite transmitters were stunned to learn that many godwits make a 7,200-mile nonstop flight each autumn from western Alaska to New Zealand, a journey that takes them eight or nine days of uninterrupted flight—the longest nonstop migration known, exercising at the same metabolic rate as a human running endless four-minute miles. . . . Journeys like this have prompted one specialist in migrant physiology to say, “The metaphor of marathon running is inadequate to fully capture the magnitude of long-distance migratory flight of birds. In some respects a journey to the moon seems more appropriate.”

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"Many birds routinely migrate across half the globe or more. Godwits, for instance, can fly up to 7,200 miles nonstop from Alaska to New Zealand."

Comment: The full article is not fully on line, so I cannot copy some of the other journeys described, but the problem for me remains, how do birds learn how to do this? The first bird to try any of this had no idea of his destination if nature is the only source of guidance. I would offer God's instructions.