Meet the birds that cross the Pacific in 9 days without stopping flapping wings

London, Oct 22 : An international team of scientists has found that birds called bar-tailed godwits take a total of nine days at a stretch to fly over the Pacific, and that too without stopping to flap their wings.

Every year, the bar-tailed godwits traverse from Alaska to Australia and southern hemisphere islands to breed, and they have now been shown to cover the distance without stopping.

In the study, the scientists fitted nine of the birds, Limosa lapponica baueri, with electronic tags before flying between 4,355 miles and 7,258 miles, depending on the route.

The study found that all the birds took from six to nine days in covering the distances.

Those, who flew for nine days, covered 6,230 miles to reach the Solomon Islands.

"This far surpassed previous maximum flight-range estimates for birds with flapping flight," Times Online quoted the authors of the study, as saying.

The study was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

ANI