Seabird Wearing Tiny Camera Films Its Own Flight Inches Above the Ocean

United Kingdom – Wild seabirds can suffer a form of "jet lag" when they travel quickly across longitudes, causing them to veer off course as they navigate by the Sun, a new study has found.

Researchers led by Patrick Lewin analysed GPS tracking data from 1,045 wild Manx shearwaters (Puffinus puffinus). The birds routinely travel more than 1,000 kilometres between feeding grounds in the Northeast Atlantic and breeding colonies in the United Kingdom.

To use the Sun as a compass, animals must make up for its movement across the sky using an internal biological clock, set mainly by the daily cycle of light and dark. Rapid travel east or west can throw that clock out of sync with local solar time. Eastward travel is expected to cause a clockwise error in direction, and westward travel a counterclockwise one.

The team found that the shearwaters' navigation became predictably skewed when fast eastward or westward travel disrupted the match between their internal clocks and local solar time. The errors closely matched those expected from a faulty Sun compass, and were more consistent with that than with changes in Earth's magnetic field.

This suggests the birds rely heavily on the Sun to navigate when out of sight of land. Surprisingly, they kept using the Sun compass even when they could have used other cues, such as following coastlines.

Footage released with the study, filmed by a small camera mounted on a bird's back, shows a Manx shearwater flying over the ocean. The birds fly thousands of kilometres to find food, using winds just above the surface to glide efficiently over the waves.