A few birds from the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.
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Bar-tailed Godwit:Bar-tailed Godwit Teguteguaq What a surprise it was to see these birds during a recent trip to Australia and New Zealand. But there they were with Y-K Delta license plates hanging from their tails, busy gobbling up critters from the mudflats and not paying any attention to the humans watching them. Bar-tailed godwits are truly an amazing bird, but I'll tell you why a little later. First, some interesting facts about them. The bird's scientific name, Umosa Iapponica, translates loosely as "muddy Laplander" ("muddy" because of its preferred feeding habitat, and "Laplander" because of where it was first described in Europe). Its common name? godwit, is believed to derive from the old English phrase "god wicht," which means "good creature," possibly referring to its use as a gourmet dish on Old World menus of the 15th and 16th centuries. This is interesting because the Yupik name for the godwit is "teguteguaq" (Hooper Bay), or "tevateguaq" (Scammon Bay), which refers to something that is taken because of its extraordinary food value. While living in Hooper Bay and Scammon Bay I often saw godwits and other large shorebirds taken by young hunters to give as special food gifts to their elders. It's curious that the Inupiaq name for the godwit, "toratoraq," is similar and probably has a similar meaning. Remember the old expression, "you are what you eat'?" Well, some of the critters godwits eat to give them such a gourmet flavor are marine worms, crustaceans, mollusks, insects and insect larvae, among others. Yum! Of course, the birds don't think of themselves as gourmet treats. They eat to build their strength for when the time comes to set up a household and have healthy strong young progeny. And speaking of households (read "nests"), Bar-tails mostly build theirs on wet, mossy, or hummocky tundra, generally not far from the ponds and mudflats where they find their favorite foods. The nest is usually a hollow depression in lichens and mosses, but is sometimes built of grasses and hidden in a clump of grass. Four speckled green or brown eggs are laid in their nests and are incubated by both the male and female. In about three weeks the eggs hatch, and the hatchlings leave the nest very soon afterward. They learn to run, swim and hunt for themselves within only a short period after that. This is where the godwit begins to become an amazing, even awesome, bird. For just as soon as the young are beginning to stretch their wings and fly, their parents are already earnestly preparing for their farflung southward migration, first to the Aleutians, then on to Australia and New Zealand where they'll spend Alaska's long winter months. Since the young birds must first grow to adult size and put on enough fat before they can even think about such an incredibly long journey south, they are not ready to migrate with their parents. When mom and dad are well on their way south, the kids are still in the Delta fattening up -- which means when they get around to starting their own migration in September, they find themselves parentless and on their own. This also means that when they get to their final migratory staging point on the edge of the western Aleutian Islands, they are likewise without parents and must make their own way all the way to New Zealand and Australia. And this, let me tell you, is no mean feat. There is more than 7000 miles of open water between the last Aleutian island and their destination Down Under, and they must fly non-stop across this tremendous expanse. Proof now exists that they do just that, for in early September, 2007, scientists tracked a female godwit, E7, with a satellite transmitter on her, non-stop from the Y-K Delta to New Zealand, a marathon distance of 7200 miles! The previous March, they had tracked her from New Zealand to the Yellow Sea (6300 miles), then from there to the Y-K Delta (4500 miles). Wow! And we're not talking about small numbers of birds that do this every single year. Of the approximately 180-200,000 Alaskan Bar-tailed godwits, roughly half end up in New Zealand, and the other half in Australia and elsewhere. How they find their way all that distance, scientists still don't know, but they suspect that, since the young do it on their own without any form of guidance from their elders, it could have something do do with an internal magnetic gyroscope. What scientists do know is that right after these sandpipers begin their non-stop ocean journey, all of their organs that are not essential for flight shrivel up to almost nothing. Only when they finally reach their destination Down Under and begin to feed again will these organs grow back to their normal size. While we were in New Zealand, scientists and other public officials were concerned about the quality of the habitat available there and in Australia for both Alaskan and Siberian godwits. A great many of their mudflats are being polluted slowly but surely to the point that one day they many endanger all shorebirds, including godwits. So they were casting around for solutions. Since the birds actually spend more time Down Under than they do in Alaska and Siberia, hopefully public officials won't waste any time in finding the solutions necessary to allow these marvellous sandpipers to continue to live healthy lives and to be able to return safe and strong to their "real homes" in the North country. If the godwits could speak, I'm sure they would agree.  |
