BRENT: A songbird weighing the equivalent of three teaspoons of sugar can fly over the north Atlantic, scientists say.The tiny superbird is the blackpoll warbler (Setophaga striata).
Tipping the scale at 12 grams, the white-throated, black-capped bird migrates from New England in the US to South America each autumn.
For half a century, scientists have debated whether the birds fly non-stop over the ocean or take breaks on land to carry out the marathon flight.
Backpack flight recorders attached to 40 of the birds have now provided “irrefutable evidence” they do it all in one go, say scientists writing in the journal Biology Letters.
The geolocators, weighing only 0.5 grams, found the birds completed an astonishing non-stop flight of between 2270 and 2770 kilometres.
This was the distance from their summer homes in Vermont and Nova Scotia to Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Greater Antilles islands, where they made landfall before continuing to northern Venezuela and Colombia.
The devices were able to track the birds’ flight paths but were not big enough to transmit the data in real time.
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