Black Brant Fly on By

BirdNote^®

Black Brant Fly on By

Written by Todd Peterson

This is BirdNote!
[Flight calls of Black Brant]
Fifty years ago, walking along the shores of Puget Sound in fall and winter, you would have been much more likely than today to hear the calls of the Black Brant, also called Pacific Brant, a small, elegant, black, brown, and white tidewater goose. While some still winter on Puget Sound, today more than 80 percent of these brants of the Pacific Flyway now fly to Baja California and the mainland coast of Mexico.
[Calls of Black Brant]
Shoreline development, wetland drainage, and declining abundance of their favorite food, eelgrass, have forced Black Brant to bypass Puget Sound and other West Coast estuaries, and to migrate directly to Mexico.
And what a migration it is! By October, almost all the world’s Black Brant gather at Izembek Lagoon on the Alaska Peninsula. In early November, in a spectacular departure, more than 100,000 birds head south.
Some of them, maintaining an average speed of 50 miles an hour, fly non-stop for 60 hours from Alaska to Mexico, traversing a distance of 3,000 miles. 
Out over the open ocean, west of the Gulf of Alaska, and down the Pacific coast they travel, navigating by their own mysterious reckoning, flying without rest for two and a half days, straight on into whatever weather awaits them. What fortitude. What adaptive self-reliance.
[Flight calls of Black Brant]
For BirdNote, I'm Frank Corrado.
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Call of the Black Brant provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Recorded by S. Palmer
Ambient tracks recorded by C. Peterson and Kessler Productions
Producer: John Kessler
Executive Producer: Chris Peterson
© 2010 Tune In to Nature.org                 October 2010
ID#093005BLBRKPLU         BLBR-01-FCr