Bar-tailed godwits

[khiemtran]

On Monday, I was showing two visitors to our office around the nearby lagoon, when I was astonished to see two bar-tailed godwits swim past. Astonished, because I had only seen them for the first time that very Saturday up in Quibray Bay in Sydney, and I had never seen them in the lagoon before. I only had my iPhone with me at the time, but I came back the next day with my DSLR and they were still there...



These extraordinary birds hold the record for the longest non-stop migration of any bird, and the longest journey without stopping to feed of any animal. They spend the northern summer as far north as Alaska, and then migrate all the way south to Australia and New Zealand.



The two of them were feeding frantically while I was there. It was quite a hard to find shots with their heads in focus, because they were constantly plunging their beaks in and out of the water.



As you can see, one was smaller than the other and didn't have red markings on its face.



They let me get quite close, maybe just three or four metres away. Here you can see, he's starting to eye me, so I backed off a little.



The long curved beaks are quite striking. Which makes it very hard to believe I would have overlooked them if they'd been to the lagoon before.



A final shot before I headed back to the lab. The next day they were gone and I haven't seen them since. Perhaps they were just fuelling up on their way further south. Or maybe the weather happened to bring them down from Sydney.

Comments

[heliopausa.livejournal.com]

I liked the pics, and I liked learning about the godwits. Thanks! :)

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

It's amazing to think they fly further than most airliners on a single tank of fuel. As you'd expect, they also need to do a huge amount of fuelling up over summer, and they're running out of habitat (especially around Sydney) where they can do that in peace.

[mnfaure.livejournal.com]

I like their colors!

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Yes, they are quite striking. I especially like the red on the face of the larger one. When we saw them on the weekend at Quibray Bay, we weren't able to see the barring very clearly, but it is really obvious up close.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

They're marvelous!

Eat up, boys and girls. That's a long journey you make.


ETA: When I went to Flickr I was better able to notice the drop of water at the tip of the beak of the one on the right in the second photo from the end--nice!

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Yes, they were actually continually dipping their long beaks into the water and pulling them out, maybe at least once a second. I'm not sure if they were filtering the water through their beaks or if it was just getting pulled up incidentally.