Meet the Short -Tailed Shearwater, a smallish bird which travels 30,000 km a year from Southern Australian waters to Kamchatka in Russia and the Aleutian Islands and back via the Pacific Coast of North America -[Photocredit: Ed Dunens / CC BY ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ) per Wikicommons] These are the kinds of birds we mean when we celebrate World Migratory Bird Day this Saturday (10/10/2020). In the Northern hemisphere, you may have celebrated the same day on May 9 and even some of the same birds, because the movement of these birds depends on the seasons. In this case we‘re mainly talking about those which use the East Asian – Australasian Flyway which brings around two million birds to our shores each spring. Many of them perform the most remarkable feats to get here. The tiny Arctic Tern for instance, weighing only 113 grams (4 ounces), travels a 71,000 km in zig zag route between Greenland and Antarctica. The speed record holder is ...
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