Friday, December 23, 2005

Frigate Flies Far For Food

This momma bird traveled quite a bit to obtain food for her chick according to this report out of Bankok.
A Christmas Island frigate bird named Lydia recently made a nonstop journey of just over 26 days and covering nearly 2,500 miles across Indonesian volcanoes and some of Asia's busiest shipping lanes in search of food for her baby.

The trip, tracked with a global positioning device by scientists at Christmas Island National Park, is by far the longest known nonstop journey by one of these critically endangered seabirds.

Lydia left her chick under the care of her partner while she was away. She set a record for both time and distance for a frigate bird, but
it falls short of the top trip among birds monitored by scientists a 46-day round-the-world trek by a gray-headed albatross, according to Birdlife International, a Britain-based conservation group that keeps track of threatened species.

That’s a lot of flying for a bird but should be compared to the long distance migrations of a species like the
Alaskan Bar-tailed Godwits have the longest non-stop flight of any migrant, flying 11,000 km to their New Zealand wintering grounds
11,000 km, non-stop! WOW!

However, this is a seasonal flight that the bird has weeks or months to recover from. Lydia may well have fed her chick and gone out on a long foraging run just a few days later.
(source: Referenrce.com: Bird Migration

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