Gray Birds Cover 40,000 Miles Annually:
"Sooty shearwaters may not look like much, but when it comes to travel they put marathoners, cyclists and pretty much everyone else to shame.
These gray, 16-inch birds cover 40,000 miles annually in search of food, the longest migration ever recorded electronically, according to a report in this week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."
How does that compare to Arctic Terns and their pole-to-pole migration? Or the east-west migration of some ptarmigans from Scandinavia to Kamtchatka and back?
"The birds, which can have a wingspan of 43 inches, followed a figure-eight circuit over the Pacific Ocean. They ranged north to the Bering Sea, south to Antarctica, east to Chile, and west to Japan and New Zealand, covering over 40,000 miles in 200 days, the researchers said."
Figure of eight? That is an unusual pattern. Is it really a migration in a traditional sense (between summer/breeding and overwintering grounds), or is it more like nomadic flying around in a predictable trajectory?
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Well 200 days leaves 165 not travelling, but the numbers sound a little funny - they are doing 200 miles a day for those 200 days? 20 miles an hour for 10 hours a day? Even giving strong winds a lot of the credit this sounds funny.
But they are traversing between the arctic and antarctic. Presuming they hit the polar regions in the local summer, they would have a lot more than 10 hours per day of sunlight.