Getting your player ready...
WASHINGTON — Arctic terns heading south for the winter like to take a break for a few days off the coast of Newfoundland.
While the little 4-ounce birds have long been famed for their migrations from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back, today’s report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science was the first to disclose their North Atlantic stopover region.
Analysis of the trips of 10 birds from Greenland and one from Iceland that were fitted with tiny geolocators showed that after heading south, they paused at a deep-water area of the North Atlantic for about 25 days before moving on.
