“So the holy grail for finding a nest is the incubation switch,” Senner explains. Senner, a biologist who spent his childhood in Alaska, has been studying Hudsonian godwit migration since 2004 and first monitored the birds’ nests in 2009.Ī problem with this tactic is that some females are so hard-wired to protect their brood, they won’t fly away from the nest entirely, even when you’re close enough to step on them. “What attracted me to them was this mystery that I knew something about and could help out with.” They are waiting for the elegant, long-legged, long-billed mother bird to fly up, shrieking and scold-ing, leaving its four-almost always four-moss-brown eggs exposed. He’s accompanied by his wife and fellow ornithologist, Maria Stager, and master’s student Lauren Puleo. That’s why Nathan Senner, an assistant professor of ornithology at the University of South Carolina, is patiently and doggedly slogging through this swamp, clad in army-green hip boots. Once you find it, you’ll get close enough to the mother bird to scare her into flight. If you are a researcher trying to capture and study baby Hudsonian godwits, you’ll look for a well-camouflaged, soup-cup-size nest on the ground. In person, the Hudsonian godwit is prepossessing, sleek and reddish brown and gold in its Alaskan spring breeding colors, with slender stiltlike legs and a very long, upturned bill specially designed for feeding in mud. They pause for a couple of weeks to refuel in wetlands in the central United States-usually Nebraska, South Dakota, Kansas or Oklahoma-and then continue back to the Alaskan bog. They fly night and day at speeds between 29 and 50 miles per hour, not stopping to eat, drink or rest. The longest leg of their journey, some 6,000 miles, is on the return from Chile. They feed again and a week later head to Argentina, feeding another time before continuing over the Andes to Chiloé Island, on the fecund Gulf of Ancud, where they arrive in September or October and winter for a little over six months. Then they continue down through the Americas to the northern Amazon-a 4,000-mile trip. First, they fly for three days to the wetlands of Saskatchewan and feed for one month. (All godwits breed in the Northern Hemisphere.) In June or July, they leave their self-sufficient hatchlings and head south.
Named after the Canadian bay where the species was first identified, and the bird’s distinctive two-syllable cry (“god-wiiit!”), Hudsonian godwits lay their eggs each spring in this Alaskan bog. There are some 70 species of shorebirds in the world that make the journey from the top of the globe to the bottom and back every year. And migratory shorebirds make the most miraculous journeys of all, given the distances they cover and their tiny size. Long-distance migration is the most extreme and life-threatening thing that any animal does. Their diet here consists mostly of small insects like mosquitoes and flies and their larvae. The Alaskan bog where Hudsonian godwits nest on the ground. This article is a selection from the January/February issue of Smithsonian magazine Buy Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12
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