The Great Frigate Bird Can Fly For 56 Days Without Landing, Resting

The amazing frigate bird can soar for 56 days without a break, according to scientists.

The study was printed in the journal Science. It was led by Henri Weimerskirch from the French National Center for Scientific Research and other biologists. The team of biologist use super-lightweight GPS trackers and followed four dozen birds from 2011 to 2015. Some birds were followed for up to two years continuously.

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The researchers were astonished when they discovered that the frigate birds could stay in the air for 56 days without landing and glide for about hundreds of miles per day with wing-flaps just every 6 minutes. They can reach a height of over 2.5 miles.

They attached the lightweight satellite transmitters to the nape of the frigate bird's necks. The solar-powered trackers included were the heart rate monitors, GPS, altimeters, and accelerometers. Weimerskirch stated that the birds weighed only 10 grams. This made it possible to trace the birds without affecting their flight.

The amazing frigate birds fly and glide in long, roller-coaster swoops in the middle of the Indian Ocean. They siphon off atmospheric energy to fly. The birds only spend about 10 percent of their time looking for food. They mostly soar from cumulus cloud to cumulus cloud and travel for up 400 miles per day. The researchers thought that the birds sleep in the air during the long travels.

Weimerskirch and his team discovered that sometimes the mounting bird's resting heart rate was as low as when they were simply sitting on their nests. This means that their flying was close to effortless.

Weimerskirch explained that when the distance between two clouds is vast, the frigate birds will enter the clouds and use its odd dynamics to shoot far upper into the air than normal so they can glide a greater distance. The researchers also discovered that some of the birds could fly as high as 2.5 miles in the air, in which the oxygen is unbearably thin and water freezes into ice. Some of them tend to favor lower distances from about 150 to 2,000 feet above the ocean waves, according to Popular Mechanics.