The bar-tailed godwit completes the world's longest non-stop bird migration — 11,000km from Alaska to New Zealand. UK birds from Siberia use a shorter but equally demanding route between Morecambe Bay and West Africa.
Bar-tailed godwit welfare is extraordinary in scale — birds undertake physiological transformations that involve growing and then shrinking internal organs, and converting almost all body fat and muscle protein into flight fuel. This extreme migration imposes welfare costs including exhaustion, dehydration and organ stress that are the natural cost of long-distance migration. Human-caused welfare additions — disturbance at key refuelling sites, habitat loss on stopover estuaries, and hunting on migration routes — are avoidable. Morecambe Bay's significance as a refuelling site for UK bar-tailed godwit means its protection from development and disturbance is critical to the welfare of the entire UK wintering population.