In February 2007, researchers fitted a transmitter to a female bar-tailed godwit off the coast of New Zealand.

A little later, on March 17, the bird set off on a journey and flew 10,270 kilometers non-stop to the Yellow Sea.

The trip lasted a week.

On May 1st, E7, as the animal is called, set off again and covered a distance of 6,510 kilometers in four and a half days to its breeding range in Alaska.

Without rest, of course.

It is not known how the snipe spent her time there, whether she fathered and raised offspring.

However, on August 30, she left the Yukon Delta and flew 11,690 kilometers non-stop in 197 hours back to New Zealand.

Kai Spanke

Editor in the Feuilleton.

  • Follow I follow

This achievement seemed so extraordinary that it was not only discussed among scientists, but also reported in the daily press.

Two years ago, a male bar-tailed godwit followed suit: 12,200 kilometers without a break in 224 hours.

Thanks to technical processes such as radio and satellite telemetry, we are gaining more and more accurate insights into avifaunistic routines.

While in the mid-nineteenth century the ancient opinion that swallows hibernate still prevailed, the most absurd myths have since been shelved, because today birds are among the best-studied animals of all.

From North Rhine-Westphalia to Portugal in seven days

So it shouldn't come as a surprise that records are being announced all the time.

The arctic tern, for example, weighs just between 85 and 125 grams, but has the longest migration distances of all migratory birds.

It breeds in the Arctic and winters in the southern hemisphere at the edge of the pack ice zone.

She covers up to 90,000 kilometers a year.

Wheatears migrating from Alaska to eastern Africa cover the longest migration route of any songbird at 14,000 kilometers.

How this can work, how a garden warbler knows when to fly where, what food to eat to build up a fat deposit, the importance of rest, ecological barriers and physiological adaptations - zoologist Franz Bairlein describes all this in his Monograph on bird migration.

There are already some excellent papers on the subject, for example by Thomas Alerstam or Bairlein's supervisor Peter Berthold.

If you add scientific publications, a small special library quickly comes together.

So what could be added?

Bairlein, who was director of the institute for bird research "Vogelwarte Heligoland" in Wilhelmshaven from 1990 to 2019, unlike his colleagues, deals extensively with the migration in Germany.

This seems justified, because 55 percent of the more than 500 species found here migrate regularly.

The author presents selected species and explains their respective route network.

The ringing remains indispensable

It can be learned, for example, that the blackcap has a particularly complex migratory behavior: A line runs from Munich via Halle an der Saale to Rostock, dividing the population into west and east migrating birds.

At the same time, some individuals now winter on the British Isles, while others fly directly south.

For those who are not familiar with the subject, the section will be a real treasure trove.

However, those readers who are familiar with the "Atlas of Bird Migration" co-edited by Bairlein in 2014 will hardly find anything new here.

In some cases, the numbers referred to act like a ranking or best-of.

However, that does not do any harm, because on the one hand they illustrate what birds can do and on the other hand they allow comparisons: "A dunnock ringed in North Rhine-Westphalia was shot 7 days later in Portugal, which corresponds to an average travel speed of 293 km/day A willow from Finland was 47 days later in S-Africa (218 km/day) or a barn swallow ringed in Hesse was in Tanzania after 36 days (188 km/day). Incidentally, the bar-tailed godwit E7 made its way from Alaska to New Zealand completed at an average speed of 59 kilometers per hour.