National Wildlife Week: Tuesday Tweets (not that kind)

There are plenty of Tweets to be found in your big backyard!

Tuesday Tweets, the second article in our National Wildlife Week series, hopes that after you retweet this blog post you’ll shut it down and take your lunch break outside. But first, check out these birds that make ridiculously long migrations annually.

Running on Empty

Ruby-throated hummingbirds are tiny—they are about three inches long and weigh less than 0.2 ounces. But that doesn’t stop these mighty little birds during their yearly migration! In early spring, ruby-throats leave their wintering sites throughout Mexico and Central America to migrate all the way to the eastern United States and southeast Canada. In this migration, many will fly 500 miles nonstop over the Gulf of Mexico without eating or drinking.

Lesser Goldfinch

With Love from Chile

While ruby-throats travel far for their size, barn swallows travel far no matter how you look at it. Barn swallows migrate from South America to the United States, traveling at distances upwards of 600 miles a day. A barn swallow you see nesting on a bridge in Idaho could have traveled all the way from Chile or Argentina.

Winner

Did you know that the Arctic tern travels between both poles every year? That is more than 44,000 miles roundtrip!

Get Moving

Watch for birds near you with Wildlife Watch, which provides lists of animals in your region.

Look for a place to birdwatch with Nature Find, the online database of nature sites across the country. You just need to pop in your zip code to get started.

Bird lovers can get more birding tips and bird behavior stories in the birds section of National Wildlife Magazine online.

Check out this Today Show appearance with NWF naturalist David Mizejewski as he showcases backyard critters like the screech owl, a toad, and a box turtle!

References:

Yale Environment 360

All About Birds by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology

Hummingbirds.net

eNature.com

Photo Credit: Warren Cooke, Lesser Goldfinch – Tucson, Arizona