[lit-ideas] Re: The Godwit and the Titi's Vomit

"The Oregonian" has developed a taste for long distance bird stories. Buried in our "Science" section yesterday was the revelation that, thanks to GPS and implanted devices, we know that a godwit flew nonstop, between Aug 29 and Sept 7, from Western Alaska to New Zealand. It had previously been tracked flying north from New Zealand, leaving on March 17 and flying 6,300 miles to China, where it rested for five weeks before flying to Alaska. The bird sleeps while flying, shutting down one side of its brain at a time.
On today's front page is the tale of a sheerwater or "muttonbird" or "titi" chick, killed by a Maori on Big Moggy, which is one of the Titi islands. In its innards was a tag that had been implanted in a 2.9 inch fish that was released from the Ringold hatchery high up the Columbia river. The dates in question? Please follow along on your handy maps. Septemeber 2004, fish gets tag at Ringold, about a third of the way up the eastern edge of Washington State. May 2005, fish passes through the Bonneville Dam, forty miles east of Portland, Oregon. April 2007, tag found in baby bird off south coast of New Zealand.
There are two explanations offered in the newspaper article: either an adult bird ate the fish possibly off the coast of Oregon in 2005 and flew home. When it started to regurgitate the contents of its stomach for the young of 2006, somehow the implant didn't come up. Theory number two is that the fish survived a year longer and was "inadvertently" caught by a factory ship off Japan or Russia. Its remains were then tossed overboard, where they were eaten by the sheerwater, who flew home and threw up in the customary manner.
Sheerwaters fly 40,000 miles in a year, five hundred miles a day. According to this site there are tens of millions of them in the Pacific: 

http://www.seaturtle.org/tracking/?project_id=229&dyn=1190916619

David Ritchie,
not quite keeping up in
Portland, Oregon



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