A Bar-tailed Godwit flew 13,560 km in 11 days and 1 hour, flying at an average of 51kmh (32 mph) without eating, drinking, or sleeping! This is the longest journey without pausing to feed by any animal. The migration each way is about 15,000 km (9,000 mi). A juvenile Godwit 5 months old was tagged in Alaska October 13th, 2022 and flew non-stop to Ansons Bay in northeast Tasmania. Mainly coastal with some tundra breeding grounds, godwits are often in flocks. They feed by probing their long bills into the mud for bristle-worms and shellfish on coastal mudflats, estuaries, and in brackish coastal lagoons, roosting in adjacent freshwater habitats. Godwits breed in Scandinavia, northern Asia, to migrate to South Africa, and Alaska to migrate to Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand. The nest is a shallow cup in moss sometimes lined with vegetation. Clutch size is from 2 to 5. Both sexes share incubation of the eggs for 20 to 21 days, the female during the day and the male at night. Male bar-tailed godwits are smaller than females and have shorter bills. In a study at the Manawatū Estuary, shorter-billed birds (males) fed mostly on small surface prey like Potamopyrgus snails, half being snail specialists, whereas females consumed more deeply-buried prey such as worms; the birds also displayed some individual food preferences. Because of the loss of intertidal staging areas in the Yellow Sea the construction of seawalls and the reclamation of mudflats have led the bar-tailed godwit to be currently Near Threatened, and the population is declining. Fewer birds have been using East African estuaries since 1979, and there has been a steady decline in numbers around the Kola Peninsula, Siberia, since 1930. The global population is estimated to number 1,099,000–1,149,000 individuals. https://www.instagram.com/p/Ckb4E8GuPwR/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
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