The longer I live the more fascinated I become with God’s creation. From eagles flying miles high to soar down in the speed of light to catch a fish as it jumps above water, to the tiniest hummingbird with tiny beaks and wings that move 90 miles a minute, I’m convinced God is in the details. Then I learned about the Godwit.
Godwits are a group of four large, long-billed, long-legged and strongly migratory waders of the bird genus Limosa. Their long bills allow them to probe deeply in the sand for aquatic worms and molluscs. In their winter range, they flock together where food is plentiful. But this is not what fascinated me.
In September 2007, a female bar-tailed godwit known to scientists as E7 lifted off from the flats of western Alaska and began flying south. She never stopped to rest, she did not look for fresh water, and she did not descend to feed. Seven days and nine nights later, she touched down on the shores of New Zealand. That little bird traveled roughly 7,145 miles over the open expanse of the Pacific Ocean in a single, unbroken journey. That takes stamina.
A bar-tailed godwit is not a large bird. Weighing barely a pound, it possesses long legs and a slender, upturned bill designed for probing mud for marine worms and mollusks. It is a shorebird, built for wading, not a seabird like an albatross that can rest on the ocean surface or soar effortlessly on thermal currents. If a godwit touches the water, it will drown. To survive a trans-Pacific crossing, E7 had to stay airborne for over two hundred consecutive hours.
To prepare for a journey of this magnitude, the godwit undergoes a radical physical transformation in the weeks leading up to departure. E7 spent the late Alaskan summer feeding continuously, swelling her body with thick layers of subcutaneous fat until she nearly doubled her normal weight. This fat was her fuel, but carrying that much weight required structural trade-offs.
Before takeoff, the bird’s digestive organs, including the stomach, intestines, and liver, actively shrink and atrophy, reducing unnecessary weight and conserving energy. Meanwhile, the heart and flight muscles enlarge to handle the extreme, prolonged workload. By the time E7 took flight from Alaska, she was essentially a streamlined pair of wings attached to a massive fuel tank, operating with only the bare essential organs required to keep her in the air.
To track the migration, E7 carried a tiny, 9.5-gram satellite transmitter surgically implanted by researchers earlier in 2007. The transmitter pinged her location to orbiting satellites, allowing scientists on the ground to watch her progress across an empty ocean landscape.
Once E7 left the coast of Alaska, there were no landmarks, no places to seek shelter from storms, and no food supplies. E7 flew through changing weather systems, navigating by a combination of the Earth’s magnetic fields, the position of the sun and stars, and a highly sophisticated internal sense of weather patterns.
On the eighth day of her journey, the tracking data showed E7 approaching the northern coast of New Zealand as she glided down toward the mudflats of the Firth of Thames, a critical shorebird habitat on the North Island. When she touched the ground, she was a skeletal version of the bird that had left Alaska a week prior. She had lost more than half her body weight, her digestive tract was shut down, and her flight muscles were severely degraded. Yet, within hours of landing, her internal organs began to regenerate, allowing her to process food again and begin rebuilding the mass she had burned across the Pacific.
I don’t know about you, but the minute details of God’s creation and how it all works proves the power of God Almighty. If He is involved this much in tiny creatures, just imagine how much detail He is involved with our lives.
Psalm 139:2-4: “You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways.
Before a word is on my tongue, you, Lord, know it completely.”
Tagged: health journey, Texas weather
