Bar-tailed godwit: 13,560 km non-stop and huntable in France

A young bird flew eleven days without a break from Alaska to Tasmania. In France, the species is nevertheless on the hunting list.

Editorial team Wild beim Wild · 26 October 2026

Wadden Sea at sunset, a resting area for migrating waders

Photo: Antje Winkler / Unsplash

On 13 October 2022, a roughly five-month-old young bird set off from Alaska on its first migration. Eleven days and one hour later, the young bar-tailed godwit, fitted with satellite transmitter number 234684, landed in Ansons Bay in eastern Tasmania. In between lay some 13,560 kilometres over the Pacific, with no landing, no food, no rest. It flew over islands such as New Caledonia and Vanuatu without stopping.

Guinness World Records recognised the flight as the longest documented non-stop migration by a bird. It surpassed the previous record, also set by a bar-tailed godwit, by more than 350 kilometres. Wild beim Wild had reported at the time on the record flight of bird 4BBRW in 2020.

Half of its body weight burned

Bar-tailed godwits from Alaska normally migrate to New Zealand. This young bird, however, veered off course and reached Tasmania. According to Eric Woehler of BirdLife Tasmania, it probably lost half of its body weight or more during the flight.

Such feats are only possible because the non-human animals build up enormous fat reserves on rich feeding grounds before departure and depend on intact resting areas along the way. It is precisely these resting areas that are disappearing. On the return journey north, the Yellow Sea between China and Korea is the most important stopover. There, tidal flats are being lost to dykes and land reclamation.

A potentially threatened species

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists the bar-tailed godwit as 'Near Threatened', and the global population is declining. In New Zealand, the number of overwintering birds fell from over 100,000 at the end of the 1980s to around 67,500 in 2018. Since 2024, Australia has classed the two subspecies that overwinter there and in New Zealand as critically endangered.

Bar-tailed godwits also migrate across Europe. The birds from Scandinavia and Siberia rest in the Wadden Sea and overwinter on the coasts of Western Europe and West Africa. In Switzerland, the species is a rare visitor.

Open to being shot in France

Despite declining populations, the bar-tailed godwit, known in French as «barge rousse», can still be hunted in France today. It is on the national list of huntable waterfowl (Arrêté of 26 June 1987). In coastal areas, recreational hunters may shoot at it from as early as 1 August in the 2026/27 season, in the middle of the migration period. Only the related black-tailed godwit («barge à queue noire») is exempt, protected by a hunting moratorium since 2008.

A bird that covers a third of the Earth's circumference in a single flight, burning half its body weight in the process, cannot afford additional losses. Every godwit that is shot is missing from a population that is already shrinking. That France continues to treat a potentially threatened species as recreational quarry shows how strongly the recreational hunting lobby holds back bird protection policy. Even with bird trapping using nets and snares, the Council of State had to stop the government several times (France further restricts bird hunting).

How poorly migratory species fare overall is shown by the UN report on migratory species. More on the wild animals.

More on the subject of recreational hunting: In our dossiers on recreational hunting gather fact-checks, analyses and background reports. What the research says about this is shown by Hunting fact-checked: the state of research.

The position of IG Wild beim Wild: IG Wild beim Wild rejects recreational hunting. Our model is the canton of Geneva, which has managed without recreational hunting since 1974: without hunting seasons, without hunting dogs, without driven hunts, without high seats, without the animal cruelty and crime that go hand in hand with hunting season elsewhere. What has worked there for over fifty years disproves every position paper by JagdSchweiz. An association that bases its policy on claims it refutes in its own documents is not a professional organisation, but a factory for misinformation.

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