Hello, again, faithful readers. This week I bring you the bar-tailed godwhit. This indefatigable little bird migrates from the arctic circle to New Zealand, the longest journey by any bird and the longest journey without pausing to feed by any animal, for a round trip of over 29,000 km or 18,020 mi. Please be good to each other and as a great man used to end his headers, smoke ’em if you got ’em and don’t step on the flowers.
“The bar-tailed godwit (Limosa lapponica) is a large and strongly migratory wader in the family Scolopacidae, which feeds on bristle-worms and shellfish on coastal mudflats and estuaries. It has distinctive red breeding plumage, long legs, and a long upturned bill. Bar-tailed godwits breed on Arctic coasts and tundra from Scandinavia to Alaska, and overwinter on coasts in temperate and tropical regions of Australia and New Zealand.
The bar-tailed godwit was formally described by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in 1758 in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae under the binomial name Scolopax limosa.[3] It is now placed with three other godwits in the genus Limosa that was introduced by the French zoologist Mathurin Jacques Brisson in 1760.[4][5] The genus name Limosa is from Latin and means “muddy”, from limus, “mud”, referring to its preferred habitat. The specific name lapponica refers to Lapland.[6][7]
The English term “godwit” was first recorded in about 1416–17 and may be an imitation of the bird’s call, or be derived from the Old English “god whit”, meaning “good creature”, perhaps referring to its eating qualities.[8][7] Its English name is taken from the black-and-white barred tail and upper tail coverts in this species.[7] In French it is known as barge rousse, Russian maliy veretennik, Inuit chiuchiuchiak, Yup’ik tevatevaaq, and Māori kūaka.[7][9]“
https://ebird.org/species/batgod
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