For Food, These Birds Will Go the Distance
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Sooty shearwaters may not look like much, but when it comes to miles logged, the gray birds put marathoners, cyclists and pretty much everyone else to shame.
Shearwaters cover 40,000 miles annually in search of food, the longest migration recorded electronically, according to a report in this week’s online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Researchers, led by Scott A. Shaffer of UC Santa Cruz, tagged shearwaters and tracked their movements along a figure-eight circuit over the Pacific Ocean that covered more than 40,000 miles in 200 days.
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