By Susan Milius
A mated pair of black-tailed godwits may fly off to separate wintering grounds a thousand kilometers apart, but they can return to their breeding grounds almost simultaneously, a migration survey has revealed.
The synchrony isn’t surprising by itself, says Jennifer A. Gill of the University of East Anglia in England. Other shorebirds, such as pairs of black turnstones, do that. The surprise with godwits showed up because Gill and her colleagues had fitted the birds with color-coded leg bands and persuaded bird-watchers across Europe to report on the winter whereabouts of the birds. This massive amount of data revealed that the returning pairs weren’t coordinating their returns the easy way—by spending the winter together. Instead, they typically spent the off-season in different countries, the team reports in the Oct. 7 Nature.