A bird breaks the nonstop flight record: 11 days and 1 hour

According to the British "Times" website reported on October 28, a small bird on the tundra in western Alaska, which had just escaped the protection of its parents, flew straight from one end of the world to the other, breaking the world record
.

However, without the latest ultralight satellite tracking technology, few would know that the 5-month-old bird landed
near a quiet fishing village in northeast Tasmania, Australia, at midnight Tuesday.
The young spot-tailed sandpiper is named 234684
in satellite tracking systems.

While early trackers could only be used to track large birds, the latest solar-powered trackers weigh the size of a page, allowing scientists to monitor the vast journeys
of small birds in real time.
Monitoring reports show that the bird flew non-stop for 11 days and 1 hour, covering 8,425 miles (about 13,500 kilometers), breaking the bird's nonstop flight record, and even during the difficult flight across the Pacific Ocean, it did not stop to rest
along the way.

The tracking principle that the scientists came up with after observation is that the microtracker for small birds cannot weigh more than 1% of the bird's body weight, and it needs to send a signal to the satellite every 90 seconds to record the bird's position
.
Eric Weller, a well-known Australian bird ecologist, said: "Twenty or thirty years ago, we put trackers weighing 300 to 400 grams on albatrosses, because there was no solar technology at that time, and trackers had to contain batteries
.
The birds we track now weigh only 300 grams or 400 grams
.
”

However, tracking technology that reveals the extraordinary feat of migratory birds may also reveal some of the adverse changes
that have taken place in the world.

Dutch ecologist Jesse Conklin captured and tagged the bird's 234684
in Alaska 15 days ago.
He believes that the mudflats of the Yellow Sea are an important prey area for migratory birds, but human occupation of mudflats deprives birds of food sources, delays their long-distance flights, and may shorten their breeding season in Alaska, which itself is already affected
by climate change.

As a result, the number of spot-tailed sandpipers arriving in Australia and New Zealand has declined
.
Although the spot-tailed sandpiper travels all the way south from Alaska, when it returns in March, it stops to feed on the mudflats of the Yellow Sea in Asia before flying another 3,000 miles to Alaska
.

In a recent paper, Conklin wrote: "Although we are not yet sure of this, we have proposed a familiar hypothesis: that human activity may be disrupting the habitat of the spot-tailed sandpiper
.
" ”

Now, the spot-tailed sandpiper, numbered 234684, is still on Tasmania's coast and is slowly recovering
from the fatigue of a long flight.
Unbeknownst to it, of course, Tasmania-based ornithologist Weller was responding non-stop to enquiries from around the world while waiting for the rain to clear so he could look for this "extraordinary" bird
on the beach.

Weller hopes that the GPS tracker on the bird will allow him to find the "sacred bird.
"
"The bird flew from the northern hemisphere, almost the northernmost point, to the southern hemisphere, almost the southernmost point of
Australia," he said.
This is a feat
.
And it's not behind Mom and Dad, it's basically flying together and heading south
.
”