Recently, a saltmarsh in Sandwich was visited by an inconspicuous little bird with an incredible migration story to tell. The Northern Wheatear is a rare and obscure visitor to the lower 48 states, despite the fact that it breeds on Arctic tundra from Eastern Canada to Alaska.
Almost every other songbird that breeds to our north passes through our area on their southbound migration. But wheatears have chosen the path less travelled. And some high tech research recently showed just how less-travelled we are talking.
Northern Wheatears don’t show themselves around these parts too often – I could find only ten records for the Cape and islands over the last 25 years. So when local birder Peter Crosson realized what he was looking at in Sandwich last week, I have little doubt he experienced what I call the rarity rush – that jolt of adrenaline that comes with finding a rare bird.
They don’t look like much – a wheatear is a small, gray and buff-colored songbird that you might pass off as a female bluebird at first glance. Since they breed in rocky, treeless tundra they share with caribou, they are most comfortable in open areas where they perch on the ground or on rocks. But a look at their folded wings reveals the elegant long and tapered look shared by that most impressive class of avian athletes, the long-distance migrants.
And in this case we’re talking really long distance migrants. For the Northern Wheatear is North America’s only breeding songbird that winters in sub-Saharan Africa. If migration were the Olympics, they’d have more gold medals than Michael Phelps. Among songbirds, they currently hold the record for the longest trans-oceanic flight, the longest non-stop flight, and the longest overall migration. And weighing in at less than an ounce, they couldn’t seem a less likely bird for the task.
Researchers attached tiny devices called geolocaters to several wheatears breeding in both Eastern Canada and Alaska, and plotted their migrations. They found that the two populations take very different routes to end up in their respective African wintering grounds. Eastern Canadian wheatears migrated across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe before heading south to West Africa. As impressive as that is, the population breeding in Western Canada and Alaska takes the overall migration gold: they head west across the Bering Sea, then continue west across the full breadth of Asia, before dropping down to East Africa for the winter.
Their round trip migration each year covers more than 18,000 miles. Ounce for ounce and inch for inch, these bantamweights are migrating as far as any bird in the world, on par with other long distance champs like Arctic Terns and Bar-tailed Godwits. When you think about it, some of these little birds passing through our fields and forests see more of the world in a single year than the vast majority of the earth’s people will see in a lifetime. Especially that guy from your high school who’s never left your hometown.
