Inside the Epic Migrations of North America’s Most Fascinating Shorebirds, From Godwits to Curlews
Ornithologist Bruce Beehler tracks down what he calls the “Magnificent Seven,” a charismatic group of migratory birds, in his new book
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A high-pitched, staccato whistle rang out across the shore. To Bruce Beehler’s teenage ears, the sound was unfamiliar. It was 1969, and he stood with his mom along the rocky coast of Maine visiting a town called Corea. Since about the age of 8, he had been flipping through field guides and falling in love with large shorebirds. But as a kid growing up in Baltimore, even as he prepared to enter his senior year of high school, Beehler had never seen one.
Immediately, he tried to catch a glimpse of the bird responsible for the piping call. Then, he saw it: a large shorebird with dark gray and brown plumage and a long, curved bill that bent down toward the earth. It flew between rocky islands, feeding among the algae.
“It was low tide, and we were able to wander out … as close as possible to this bird,” Beehler says. “We got closer and closer, and then it flew off and circled and called and disappeared.” He identified the bird as a whimbrel—the first that he and his mother had ever seen—and that moment stuck with him. It helped spark a lifelong interest in the whimbrel and its relatives.
Now a retired ornithologist and a research associate at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, Beehler has returned to his shorebird-seeking roots and taken a cross-continental journey to better understand these species and their breeding grounds. In Flight of the Godwit, set to release on April 15, he details his recent four-year-long trek to trace these birds’ movements.
His guiding principles were to “get out in the countryside,” he says, “do this solo, travel as much as possible by car in the back roads, basically taking in as much of America as possible in the broadest sense, meeting people, going to these beautiful green spaces and following these wonderful birds.”
Flight of the Godwit: Tracking Epic Shorebird Migrations
Soar across 46 North American territories to uncover the secrets of seven magnificent shorebirds, the world’s greatest nonstop travelers.
Between spring 2019 and spring 2023, Beehler searched far and wide to get to know these birds and their habitats. He spent 223 days on the road, racking up 35,087 miles by car, 14,614 miles by plane and 378 miles on trains—not to mention two chartered helicopter rides. For 108 days, he camped in a tent. Beehler hit nine provinces and territories of Canada and visited 37 U.S. states. He found the breeding grounds of all the “Magnificent Seven,” a select group of shorebirds that served as the focus for his project.
The Magnificent Seven isn’t a term you’ll likely find in a field guide—it’s a moniker of Beehler’s own creation. “These seven species are royalty for their beautiful plumages, large size, entrancing habits and migratory prowess,” he writes in the book. They include the whimbrel, a few godwits, some curlews and a chatty sandpiper.
Unless you’re a seasoned birder, telling the Magnificent Seven apart could be a bit of a headache. At a glance, they all share similar mottled plumage and the same relative shape—a rotund body with stilt-like legs, a long neck and a lengthy bill. But here’s one ID pointer: The tips of godwits’ bills point slightly upward, while the bills of curlews gradually curve down.
Because these birds travel great distances between their breeding and wintering grounds, they served as an inspiration to guide Beehler’s wanderlust. “For me, the great joy in life today is traveling across the face of North America out in nature,” he says. “And these birds, they do that to the max.”
By following the shorebirds on their migratory treks, “they take me to places I didn’t even know existed.”
While on the trails of these birds, Beehler pored over atlases, trawled local sightings reported on eBird and tracked down locations that were truly remote. Flight of the Godwit is about birds—but it’s also about breathtaking landscapes and Beehler’s experiences traversing the lesser-known areas of North America. And in describing his adventures, Beehler hopes he will inspire someone else to get out and explore.
Here are the seven species that served as the centerpieces for Beehler’s travels.
Hudsonian godwit
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The first time he saw breeding Hudsonian godwits, Beehler was in Churchill, a remote town in the far north of Manitoba. He parked his car in Winnipeg, in southern Manitoba, where the weather was roughly 80 degrees. But when his flight landed in Churchill, the air was only 35 degrees—despite it being nearly summer. The frigid town known for its polar bears and belugas is on the southwestern shore of Hudson Bay. Even at that time of year, the inland sea is a “frozen block of ice,” Beehler says, and that gives Churchill nearly Arctic-like temperatures, despite being south of the Arctic circle. “It’s snowing most days,” Beehler adds, “and the birds are actually arriving in the snow.”
The male godwits are the first to appear, alighting in the boggy tundra fen. But before you see them, you’ll hear them. “They’re giving their high-pitched calls, and then they’re … doing these display flights high up overhead,” Beehler says.
“It’s unforgettable,” he adds.
In Flight of the Godwit, the Hudsonian godwit is Beehler’s “flagship species,” the focus of his project. He chose this bird, because it’s “one of the most beautiful of the large shorebirds.” They’re not rare, per se, but they are elusive and challenging to find, even though their migratory journey and breeding grounds span several U.S. states and Canadian provinces. What’s more, when they head for warmer weather in winter, the large shorebirds fly to the southern tip of South America, often by performing lengthy, nonstop flights over the open ocean.
Bar-tailed godwit
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When it comes to migratory prowess, the bar-tailed godwit is the champion, bar none. These endurance athletes fly between their breeding grounds in western Alaska and their wintering grounds in Australia and New Zealand twice a year. Their flight south requires crossing the Pacific Ocean on a death-defying journey during which they do not pause to feed or rest.
In 2022, a juvenile bar-tailed godwit named B6 flew an unbroken 8,425 miles across 11 days from Alaska to Tasmania, Australia, setting the record for the longest nonstop migration. This serious stamina makes the bar-tailed godwit “the greatest of overwater migrators,” Beehler writes in the book.
To build up enough energy to last through such a feat, bar-tailed godwits spend weeks putting on weight. They’ll double their body size by boosting their fat reserves, and their heart and wing muscles will grow. The birds’ lungs increase in capacity. And to compensate for all this bulk, the less necessary organs for flight—such as the liver, kidneys and digestive tract—will actually shrink.
Considering that some of these birds have reached 23 years or older, they might clock 300,000 lifetime miles of migratory flight. Especially long-lived godwits stretch that number to 374,000 or more.
The Arctic tern is often heralded as the most impressive avian migrator for making the longest journey: a twice-yearly trip between Earth’s poles. But godwit researchers say these shorebirds have a right to the title. “We are always duking it out with those tern people,” Nathan Senner, an ornithologist who studies godwits at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, joked to Smithsonian magazine’s Jim Robbins in 2022. The tern, he noted, stops and eats along its trip, but the godwit fasts in flight. To some, that’s a point in favor of the shorebird.
Upland sandpiper
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For a shorebird, the upland sandpiper is a bit odd: It tends to avoid wetlands, instead opting for the prairie scene, where it distinguishes itself by hunting insects like grasshoppers rather than marine crustaceans. In another break from the norm, the upland sandpiper is the smallest of the Magnificent Seven—“but I think it definitely merits being in that group,” Beehler says.
Known familiarly as an “uppie,” the bird doesn’t let its small stature stop it from covering a lot of ground. The species vanishes entirely from the continent during winter, trekking from the Great Plains to the grasslands of South America. They’ll regularly fly more than 3,000 miles in one go and can cover more than 12,000 miles in a year.
Males give a spectacular mating display, flapping in circles around their territory and letting out a distinctive call sometimes known as the “wolf whistle.” This call is a staple of the summer soundscape in American prairies, where the uppie serves as an indicator species for prime habitat.
The sandpiper’s trill is “among the most pleasing and remarkable sounds of rural life,” as Edward Howe Forbush wrote in Birds of Massachusetts and Other New England States. According to Beehler: “That’s a bird that no one ever tires of seeing.”
Bristle-thighed curlew
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Beehler remembers a time when he spotted a bristle-thighed curlew on a football field in Hawaii. But don’t count on being so lucky yourself. The bristle-thighed curlew is the hardest to find of the Magnificent Seven—a “totally crazy, crazy rare bird,” he says. If you’re in the right place at the right time, you could also see one in Hawaii. The only other way to glimpse these birds in North America is to trek to their breeding grounds in remote Alaska.
The elusive species’ breeding area is a four-hour drive on a dirt road from Nome, Alaska, followed by a hike to the summit of a small tundra hilltop. Then, you can only “hope that one of the breeding birds … makes a sound or flies overhead,” Beehler says.
“First time I went, I spent, I think, five hours out there looking for it. No luck,” he recalls. “I went a few days later, and I was very lucky to actually see the bird and photograph it.”
Because of how difficult it is to access the species’ breeding grounds, researchers didn’t find a nest of the bristle-thighed curlew until 1948—making it one of the last birds on the continent to have its nest and eggs described by scientists. Prior to that, its breeding ecology had been largely a mystery.
In terms of appearance, the species closely resembles the whimbrel, which shares its breeding area but is far more common. Described as an “incredibly accomplished” bird by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the bristle-thighed curlew is the only shorebird that’s been found to use tools. The crafty creatures will use their beaks to throw bits of coral at albatross eggs, then exploit the cracks in the shell and feed.
Beyond its hard-to-reach habitat, the bristle-thighed curlew is also hard to find because its population is so small. Only 10,000 of the birds are estimated to exist worldwide. From their Alaskan breeding grounds, the curlews will make an epic migration of at least 2,500 miles to northwestern Hawaii—and some will even flap as far as the South Pacific, tacking an additional 1,250 miles onto their journey.
Marbled godwit
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Larger than both the Hudsonian and bar-tailed, the marbled godwit “is the giant among godwits,” writes Beehler in the book. Standing in their breeding plumage, the shorebirds are a sight to behold. The dark speckles on their wings and backs stand out, and their black-tipped bills shift from pink at the base during the non-breeding season to orange in the breeding season. They sport dark caps, and their eyes are cut through with a dark bar.
“This is one of our most handsome and impressive shorebirds,” Beehler writes.
On his shorebird odyssey, the marbled godwit is one of the first of the Magnificent Seven that Beehler got to observe. At Fort Travis on the Bolivar Peninsula in eastern Texas, he spotted a handful of godwit pairs foraging in the short grass. “Over the years, there has been no place on Earth where I have spent more quality time, at close range, with members of the Magnificent Seven,” he notes in the book.
Marbled godwits often appear with the other grassland-breeding shorebirds: the upland sandpiper and the long-billed curlew. Above the prairies, males perform high-altitude flight displays to attract a mate, circling their territory and calling. Though most marbled godwits breed in the Great Plains, two small populations wing their way to James Bay, Canada, and to Alaska. In winter, they fly to coastal areas in the southern U.S., Mexico and Central America.
Long-billed curlew
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The long-billed curlew is the largest shorebird in North America, standing around two feet tall. Even compared with the marbled godwit, this species is super-sized. “Any encounter with this huge, rusty-colored shorebird is a special event,” Beehler writes in the book. And true to its name, this bird’s thin and curved bill is “almost impossibly long,” per the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
Though the long-billed curlew appears on mudflats and marshes during migration and winter, it breeds in the prairie and can be found on grasslands year-round. These birds are often seen foraging, perhaps stepping across the prairie in a line to flush insect prey from the grass. Their namesake bills can probe into the ground to snatch deep-burrowing creatures, whether crabs, shrimp or worms and other invertebrates. They share habitat with whimbrels and marbled godwits and are often seen alongside them.
Compared with some of the other birds in the Magnificent Seven, the long-billed curlew doesn’t fly so far—it’s a short- to medium-distance migrant, with most wintering in northern Mexico or the southern U.S. and some individuals flying to Central America.
But the curlew’s slightly shorter migration doesn’t keep it from earning a place among Beehler’s favored shorebirds. In fact, he places it at the top. “The long-billed curlew is North America’s most magnificent shorebird,” he writes in the book, “the master of the Magnificent Seven.”
Whimbrel
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The whimbrel has fascinated Beehler ever since he spotted it for the first time as a teen on the coast of Maine. This long-distance migrant winters as far south as South America and breeds in Alaska and northern Canada. It can often be seen walking slowly along the shore, poking around for fiddler crabs, among the species’ favored prey. On grasslands, it might seek out berries, including blueberries, cranberries and crowberries.
During his recent travels, Beehler encountered skittish whimbrels in Churchill and deliberately foraging whimbrels in Alaska. He found himself back in Maine on the Schoodic Peninsula, not far from where he had traveled with his mom decades earlier. After an evening where his hopes of seeing shorebirds were hampered by fog, he got up early and biked to the tip of Schoodic Point.
Just as he was leaving, he heard the now-familiar call of a whimbrel and watched it descend from the sky to perch on some seaweed-coated rocks. “Here was a ghost from my birding past,” he writes in the book, “almost 50 years to the day after I saw my first whimbrel at nearby Corea.”
Even after all this time, the whimbrel is still a thrilling sight for Beehler. “Every time I see a whimbrel, I think of that first time I saw it in Maine,” he says. “Those memories, they never go away. They’re so special.”