Bird's 13,000-km, non-stop flight may be record-breaking

A young bar-tailed godwit appears to have set a non-stop distance record for migratory birds by flying at least 13,560 kilometres from Alaska to the Australian state of Tasmania, a bird expert said Friday.

The bird was tagged as a hatchling in Alaska during the Northern Hemisphere summer with a tracking GPS chip and tiny solar panel that enabled an international research team to follow its first annual migration across the Pacific Ocean, Birdlife Tasmania convenor Eric Woehler said. Because the bird was so young, its gender wasn’t known.

Aged about five months, it left southwest Alaska at the Yuko-Kuskokwim Delta on