September 15 : A female shorebird has covered a distance of 7,145 miles (11,500 km), flying non-stop without food or drink from Alaska to New Zealand.

Biologists who tracked the bird’s flight said that it was the longest non-stop bird migration ever measured.

They said that the bird, a wader called a bar-tailed godwit, completed its journey in nine days.

The scientists further said that the trek confirmed that godwits make the southbound trip of their annual migration directly across the vast Pacific rather than along the East Asian coast.

“This shows how incredible and extreme birds can be,” National Geographic quoted Phil Battley of New Zealand’s Massey University, a participant in the study, as saying.

“The prospect of a bird flying all the way across the Pacific was so much further than what we thought possible, it seemed ludicrous,” he added.

The documentation of the long haul occurred while the US Geological Survey and PRBO Conservation Science, a California-based nonprofit dedicated to bird research, were carrying out a study of godwit migration.

Some 70,000 godwits make the epic journey from their northern summer breeding grounds in Alaska down to New Zealand each September, before flying all the way back the following March.

With a view to studying this annual trek north, Battley and his colleagues fitted satellite transmitters to 16 godwits at two locations in New Zealand last summer.

Battley said that he was amazed to find that one of the birds flew some 6,340 miles (10,200 kilometers) directly to a wetland on the North Korea-China border.

He further said that the bird continued another 3,000 miles (5,000 kilometers) to Alaska, after feeding and resting at the border. (ANI)