As tagging devices get smaller and more sophisticated, they are revealing even more wonders of shorebird migration. We already know that Great Snipe are amazing – flying up to 7,000 km non-stop – but a 2021 paper by Åke Lindström and colleagues describes a striking daily cycle of altitude change during their long migratory journeys.
In their new paper in Current Biology, Åke Lindström and colleagues have used activity and air pressure data from multisensor dataloggers to show that Great Snipes repeatedly changed altitudes around dawn and dusk, between average cruising heights about 2,000 m (above sea level) at night and around 4,000 m during daytime. Most birds regularly flew at 6,000 m and one bird reached 8,700 m, an altitude that is just 150m short of clearing the top of Mount Everest! The same daily cycle was apparent everywhere – independently of climate zone, habitat and the height…
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