Forget ultra marathon runners. Nature’s long-distance athletes are birds. They travel incredible distances on their migration routes, with one notable species circumnavigating the whole of the globe.
It’s mostly to take advantage of resources, such as food, which is most available during certain seasons. For example, insects are only abundant at high latitudes in summer. This allows migratory birds to take advantage of more favourable conditions to feed and breed, perhaps without some of the competition for those resources that they would face from other birds if they stayed put. Many migratory bird species share similar routes, known as ‘flyways,’ which are like avian motorways in the sky.
In this Olympic year, we look at how four long-distance migrants measure up.
In runner-up position is the Turtle Dove, which migrates between West Africa and Europe, a journey of around 5,000 km (3,106 miles). In northern Europe, they’re a farmland bird, breeding mostly in dense scrub thickets and some mature hedgerows. Sadly, Turtle Doves are now on the Red List of conservation concern, and they have been the UK’s fastest-declining breeding bird.
They’ve suffered from two main threats: loss of seed food from their farmland breeding areas in the UK, and elsewhere in Europe, through agricultural intensifiction, and unsustainable levels of hunting on migration. The RSPB and partners set up Operation Turtle Dove to help turn their fortunes around. Operation Turtle Dove collaborates with landowners, farmers, communities, and volunteers to provide essential nesting and feeding habitat in ‘Turtle Dove Friendly Zones’ in eastern and southeastern England.
The RSPB also played a leading role in ending unsustainable levels of hunting of Turtle Doves in south-west Europe, which is the other essential requirement for their long-term recovery.
Saving migratory species such as Turtle Doves is challenging and requires co-ordinated work at large scales across borders. But the seeds of recovery have been sown, and we’re optimistic for a future where the Turtle Dove’s purring call is more common.
Taking the bronze medal is the Swift. Their migration is between Africa and Europe, a respectable 12,000 km (7,500 miles) in each direction. But what’s special about Swifts is that they only really come to land to nest. Everything else, they do on the wing, and that includes feeding, sleeping, mating, and even drinking (they fly low over bodies of water, taking shallow sips).
And whilst they don’t migrate as far as our gold medal winner, they hold the title of one of the fastest birds in level flight, recorded reaching incredible speeds of up to 122 km per hour (70 miles per hour).
Sadly, Swifts are in trouble. Most Swifts nest in the eaves of buildings, entering through holes and gaps, with breeding adult birds returning to the same nest site each year. But when older buildings are renovated, and their nest holes blocked up, they can find themselves shut out of their homes.
You can help them by putting up a Swift nestbox or installing Swift bricks, giving them a guaranteed safe place to nest. We’ve also developed the Swift Mapper app that allows you to report sightings of nesting Swifts. This helps build a picture of where Swift nest sites need to be protected and where new Swift nest sites can be best provided, close to existing nests.
The silver long-distance medal has to go to the Bar-tailed Godwit. The different breeding populations of this long-billed wader all spend their summers in the far north, then go south to escape the harsh winters of the Arctic. With this silver medal for distance, the Bar-tailed Godwit also wins the prize for endurance. In 2022, a Bar-tailed Godwit of the ‘bauri’ subspecies flew non-stop from Alaska to southern Australia, a feat that took 11 days, night and day, without stopping to rest, eat or drink – an epic journey of 13,000 km (8,080 miles).
We’ve recently launched a tagging programme to find out more about the migration routes of the Bar-tailed Godwits that visit the UK. Scientists from our project partner, the Wash Wader Research Group, attached GPS tracker ‘backpacks’ to Bar-tailed Godwits. These are designed to be both small and light, so they don’t affect the bird but give us fascinating data about their migration routes, and the key sites along these, on which the birds rely.
The Wash estuary on the east coast of England is one of these - globally-important hotspot for migratory birds such as Bar-tailed Godwits. In 2022, the RSPB helped initiate the process for granting the Wash, along with other coastal wetlands from the Humber to the Thames, UNESCO Natural World Heritage site status, like the Great Barrier Reef.
Whilst the athletic prowess of Turtle Doves, Swifts and Bar-tailed Godwits are undoubtedly impressive, the long-distance superstar must be the Arctic Tern. Its migration is the longest it can possibly be – from pole to pole. They breed in the Arctic and northern temperate regions in our summer months, but then migrate as far as the waters around Antarctica each year. In their lifetime, one Arctic Tern flies the distance of between the Earth and the Moon, three times.
You could say Arctic Terns are sun-worshippers. They head north just as summer is starting – they’re in the UK from around April to September – and then once they reach Antarctic waters, summer’s beginning again there, too.
And even though they fly incredible distances, they’re pretty accurate navigators too. They return to their exact breeding locations, year after year.
If you’ve enjoyed reading these facts about birds and migration, then you’ll love the Natural History Museum’s new exhibition called Birds: Brilliant and Bizarre, in affiliation with the RSPB. This new exhibition explores birds’ incredible story throughout history – from surviving the mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs, to how they diversified into a staggering 11,000 distinct species. As a bonus, RSPB members get 20% off tickets to the exhibition.
