Back on October 2, a Plymouth birder was sorting through shorebirds at Plymouth Long Beach, the narrow, 3-mile barrier beach protecting Plymouth Harbor. Among some expected Black-bellied Plovers and a handful of less expected Red Knots milling about on the harbor side of the peninsula, he saw some sandpipers with long, slightly upturned bills – godwits! Any species of godwit is a nice find – all are uncommon and/or declining. He did what so many birders before him had done – though something didn’t seem right about them, he went with what he thought was the safer identification – in this case Hudsonian Godwit. Lucky for all the birders who came over the ensuing days, he was wrong.
As is so often the case, the correct identification was made when prolific eBird reviewer Jeremiah Trimble, a native Cape Codder and curatorial associate of the bird collection at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, saw the photos. These were, improbably, a trio of Bar-tailed Godwits – no more than one has ever been seen at one time over most of the North American continent as far as I can tell. The idea of finding three Bar-tailed Godwits casually roosting together on a Massachusetts beach like they do it all the time was beyond absurd.
This tall, long-billed sandpiper has in recent years been crowned the champion long-distance migrant among, well, all animals, thanks to increasingly small, or perhaps decreasingly large, satellite tracking devices. The North American race, which breeds in northern Alaska, migrates non-stop nearly 7000 miles from the Bering Sea to Australia or New Zealand. To get your head around this astonishing athletic feat, find an actual, physical globe, or the Google Earth version properly zoomed out to see the whole earth, and spin it so you see nothing but ocean, with Hawaii looking tiny in the middle of that entirely blue side of the planet.
Since I last wrote about this species back in 2017, a four-month-old Bar-tailed Godwit unimaginatively named B6 has shattered the previous world record for migration, without feeding or resting, by any animal. B6 flew over 8400 miles from Alaska to Tasmania, over 11 days, without stopping. The previous record, by Bar-tailed Godwit E7, was 7000 miles over 8 days.
To accomplish this ultramarathon flight, the godwits first go through a severe physiological transformation – their digestive and reproductive organs shrink, while their heart and breast muscles get real swole, as gym people say, to power the sustained flight. To fuel those muscles, they become 55% fat, so more fat than bird. That’s the highest fat level for any bird species, and just slightly below my fat levels by the end of the holidays each winter.
We have around 14 records of this species in Massachusetts. I thought the most recent record was one that many of us got to see in various spots from Eastham to Chatham back in 2017. But, unbeknownst to me until yesterday, a stunning male in full, brick-red breeding regalia was photographed on Tuckernuck, off the west end of Nantucket, back in May. Most of the records have been determined to be the relatively lazy European race that breeds in arctic Scandinavia – instead of crossing 8000 miles of trackless ocean, that subspecies might only go from northern Finland to Scotland for the winter – West Africa at the furthest. I wouldn’t be surprised if they smoked cigarettes along the way.
As expected, the Plymouth birds were determined by their plumage to be of the short-distance migrant European subspecies. One of those actually wintered on Plymouth Harbor way back in 1997. Sadly, these three godwits disappeared back on the 9th. As with any rare bird that disappears, they could have just moved to another beach, so keep your eyes peeled for three lanky European sandpipers trying to blend in with the locals. You never know, you could be the next person to exclaim “oh my Godwit!”. Especially if you see them smoking a cigarette.
