'Extreme Nomad' Bird Puts Your Frequent Flier Miles to Shame

Think you've racked up an impressive number of frequent flier miles? Are you the kind of person to travel at a moment's notice? Sorry, but you've got nothing on the banded stilt. A new study has observed how this remarkable desert-dwelling bird will travel well over a thousand miles at the drop of a hat just to chow down on some incredibly unpredictable prey.

The study, recently published in the journal Biology Letters, details how Australia's banded stilt (Cladorhynchus leucocephalus) has one of the most unpredictable-yet-lengthy migrations among waterbirds.

That's because these unusual waterbirds, which traditionally make their home along coastal wetlands, exploit an incredibly rich, yet short-lived resource whenever they can.

According to study author Reece Pedler of Deakin University in Victoria, Australia, experts had long noticed that on seemingly random occasions, great flocks of the banded stilt would disappear from their natural habitats for short periods of time, only to return well-fed and healthy.

So where were they going? Using satellite telemetry on 21 birds, Pedler and his colleagues tracked this random nomadic behavior of the banded stilt. They found that the birds would travel up to 1,300 miles to find temporary desert salt lakes. There, they would gorge on Australian brine shrimp, which hatch from eggs that may have been lying formant in a lakebed's dry and salty crust for years.

The coastal flooding that fills the lakes and hatches the shrimp is incredibly unpredictable, and is difficult for even scientists to track. Previous observations of banded stilts' breeding in these temporary lakes had led to the assumption that the birds were simply opportunists. (Scroll to read on...)

However, this new data suggests that they somehow know when these floods are coming and fly like the wind to get there in time for all-you-can-eat shrimp.

"We were very surprised at the distance, duration and speed of banded stilt flights," Pedler told New Scientist.

Still, he admits it makes sense that these birds would be willing to expend tons of energy in such a short amount of time to find these lakes. The promise of enough food to go around is a near-certainty.

"These tiny shrimp grow rapidly and are so numerous that the briny water has been likened to brine-shrimp soup," he added.

Other waterbirds, like the flamingo, have been observed to have a similar "rain sense" but none of these species come close to the rapid and sudden travel that the banded stilt has shown. The authors of the study admit that we still know very little about how these birds make such impressive and accurate weather predictions.