Portfolio: Nursery At Risk

The bar-tailed godwit is an unassuming shorebird that weighs about ten ounces and has a wingspan of thirty inches. It looks like nothing special. But in fact, it conducts the longest nonstop migration of any bird: In the fall, after breeding, godwits leave the North Slope of Alaska and fly across the Pacific Ocean to Australia or New Zealand, averaging thirty-five miles per hour over eight days and nearly seven thousand miles, without a break for food or water. In spring, they return and then lay their eggs on Alaska’s tundral Coastal Plain, home to the densest concentration of birds in the north.

Specifically, they return to what’s known as the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, at twenty-three million acres the largest bloc of federal land in the United States. About the size of Indiana, the NPR-A lies west of the better-known Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, but to birds it’s a far more important location. One-third of the world’s hundred million shorebirds live seasonally in Alaska,