Superbird, the Blackpoll warbler
The most amazing "superbird" in nature is a puny songbird that migrates over 2,600 kilometers every year in a feat scientists say is probably without parallel in the animal kingdom.
Why? That's because this superbird, the "blackpoll warbler" (Setophaga striata), weighs some 15 grams (half an ounce), is only 15 centimeters (5.9 inches) long and has wings with a span of only 25 cm (10 inches).
Despite these physical limitations, this tiniest of birds manages to perform the superhuman feat of flying from its homes in Canada and northeastern United States to its winter ground in sunny South America in a yearly trek covering 2,600 km (1,600 miles).
Even more amazing is these birds do much of their non-stop flying of about three days over the Atlantic Ocean. Blackpoll warblers have the longest migration of any species of New World warbler.
For the first time ever, scientists have tracked the migration pattern of these superbirds. They used miniature geolocators, which weigh only half a gram and rely on light sensors rather than GPS technology, to track the blackpoll warblers and settle a 50 year-old debate about whether these birds "really do take this extraordinary over-ocean flight."
The answer was a conclusive "Yes".
"It sort of defies the imagination on a number of levels," said Chris Rimmer, a study co-author and Vermont Center for Ecostudies ornithologist, as reported by the Washington Post.
"One is just the energy, the sheer energy and physiology required to propel a bird that many miles, an average of about 1,600 miles. But it's also a navigational feat, an orientation miracle in a way that the birds can strike out from land and head out over the water and reach their destination two or three days later."
"Compared with previously published non-stop flight estimates for other species, our data suggest that blackpolls undergo one of the longest distance non-stop overwater flights ever recorded for a migratory songbird", the researchers wrote in the journal Biology Letters.
Rimmer said the blackpoll warbler is in a class of its own.
"If you can account for the size of this bird and the distance it goes," he said, "it's arguably more remarkable, maybe the most remarkable flight of its kind."
The researchers were from the Vermont Center for Ecostudies, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and University of Guelph in Ontario.
