Life on the East Asian Flyway - Part 4: The Arctic

Discovery

BBC

Science, Technology

4.3 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 27 June 2016

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

After flying thousands of kilometres from faraway Bangladesh and New Zealand via the Yellow Sea, the shorebirds of the East Asian Flyway complete their northward migration. They touch down in the Arctic Russia and Alaska to breed.

In May and June, birds such as the endangered spoon-billed sandpiper and red knot fill the air of the Russian tundras with their mating calls and display flights. But why travel so far to raise the next generation?

Presenter Ann Jones also discovers why Russian and British conservationists are taking eggs from the nests of the spoon-billed sandpiper, the most endangered shorebirds in the world, in a last ditch effort to save the species from extinction.

Finally, with the mating season finished and a new generation ready to migrate for the first time, we follow the incredible non-stop flight of nine days by the bar-tailed godwit, as it migrates south from Alaska all the way to New Zealand. The record-breaking species is helped by somehow being able to sense the weather patterns across the entire Pacific Ocean.

The series is a co-production from the BBC World Service and Australian ABC Radio National. The sound recordings from Russia and Alaska were provided by the Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

(Photo: Spoon-billed sandpiper chick in Chukotka, NE Russia. Credit: Nicky Hiscock)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading from the BBC.
0:03.0	The details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use,
0:07.0	go to BBCworldservice.com slash podcasts. broadcasts. in the spring. For me anyway as a shorter biologists I you know wait for the
0:28.1	gavic calls in the spring and that really means to me okay things are
0:30.7	getting started. There are so many species of shorebirds calling.
0:37.0	And everybody's calling.
0:40.0	And everybody's doing it all at once because they have such a short breeding season.
0:47.0	The Tundra of the Arctic, the most northerly end of the East Asian-Australian flyway,
1:02.4	the great bird migration route which discovered. flyway. The Great Bird Migration Route which Discovery has been following over the last month,
1:08.0	from Australia through East Asia to here.
1:12.0	Hello, I'm Anne Jones on the BBC World Service.
1:18.0	Shorebirds, or you might know them as waders, are the long-distance avian superstars that we've been flying alongside for the last three episodes.
1:28.0	And now we arrive in Alaska and Northeastern Russia, where they transform from birds of the shoreline to
1:35.3	creatures of dry land and if luck is on their side they'll hatch the next
1:41.3	generation of these miracles of nature.
1:44.4	The bird which is 50 gram,
1:48.8	smaller than a shot of a vodka glass.
1:53.1	How can it fly that far?
1:55.2	But they actually can do that.
1:57.6	It's amazing, tiny small sherbird in Australia in three months. It's going to be breeding in the
2:06.3	Russian Arctic. It's absolutely fascinating.
2:10.3	Evgeny Surichkovsky, who leads Arctic Way to Conservation for the NGO Birds Russia.
	...

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