Wild Island

In October 2022, wildlife researchers tracking migratory shorebirds watched something extraordinary unfold. A juvenile Bar-tailed Godwit, identified only as B6, departed the Alaskan tundra on its very first migration. Just a few months earlier it had hatched during the short Arctic summer. It had never made this journey before. Yet once it left Alaska, it remained airborne for more than eleven days, flying continuously across the Pacific Ocean before finally landing in Tasmania. The journey covered more than 13,500 kilometres, setting the record for the longest non stop flight ever documented by a bird.

For scientists, B6 represented an extraordinary achievement in migration research. Satellite transmitters have transformed our understanding of bird migration, allowing researchers to follow individual birds across entire oceans for the first time. Yet B6 also posed an enduring question. How could a bird making its very first migration successfully navigate from Alaska to Tasmania without ever having completed the journey before?

Researchers know that migratory birds rely on a remarkable combination of inherited instincts, the Earth’s magnetic field, the position of the sun and stars, polarised light and favourable weather conditions. Even so, migration remains one of the natural world’s greatest mysteries. Every year, millions of birds complete journeys that would seem impossible, returning with astonishing accuracy to places they have never seen or have not visited for many months.

For most Australians, B6’s journey was simply an extraordinary wildlife story. Yet it also reveals something much larger. Tasmania is not an isolated island at the bottom of the world. It forms the southern end of one of the planet’s great migration routes, connected by invisible pathways to Alaska, Siberia and more than twenty countries across the East Asian–Australasian Flyway (EAAF). Every spring and summer, migratory shorebirds arrive on our coast after journeys spanning thousands of kilometres, relying on a network of wetlands that has sustained them for thousands of years.

Life on the Alaskan Tundra

Each year, billions of birds migrate between breeding and non breeding areas. Some move only short distances, while others travel across continents and oceans. For shorebirds that breed in the Arctic, migration is not an optional behaviour. It is the strategy that allows them to use one part of the world when it is briefly rich with food, then leave before winter makes survival impossible. The journey may appear extreme, but it is shaped by a simple biological reality: no single place provides everything these birds need throughout the year.

The Arctic may seem like an unlikely place for small birds to raise their young, but during its short summer it becomes one of the most productive breeding landscapes on Earth. Long daylight hours allow plants to grow quickly and insects to emerge in enormous numbers. For shorebirds, this brief explosion of life provides the food needed to form eggs, feed chicks and complete the breeding season before conditions change again. The same landscape that becomes frozen and hostile in winter becomes, for a few short weeks, an extraordinary nursery.

That abundance does not last. As the Arctic summer ends, temperatures fall, food becomes scarce and the breeding grounds begin to close down. Birds that remain would face snow, ice and a rapidly shrinking food supply. Migration allows them to leave before those conditions arrive, travelling to warmer regions where feeding remains possible through the northern winter. The return journey the following year is just as important, because breeding in the Arctic gives them access to food and daylight conditions that are difficult to match elsewhere.

Among all migratory shorebirds, the Bar-tailed Godwit has become one of the clearest examples of how extreme these journeys can be. The Alaskan breeding population is known for flights across the Pacific that can continue for more than a week without landing. In October 2022, a juvenile Bar-tailed Godwit known as B6 was tracked flying from Alaska to Tasmania in just over eleven days, covering about 13,560 kilometres. USGS described it as the longest documented non stop flight by any animal.

What makes B6 especially remarkable is that it was a juvenile. The bird had hatched only a few months earlier on the Alaskan tundra. It had never migrated before, and it had never crossed the Pacific. Yet on its first southbound journey, it departed Alaska and completed a flight that pushed the known limits of avian endurance. For researchers, B6 was not simply an impressive individual. It provided a rare window into how young birds can complete vast migrations without previous experience of the route.

Migration on this scale depends on preparation long before the bird leaves the ground. Bar-tailed Godwits build enormous fat reserves before departure, turning food into the fuel required for sustained flight. Earlier research on Alaskan Bar-tailed Godwits found that birds preparing for trans Pacific migration carried huge fat loads, while their digestive organs were comparatively small. Later work revisited this idea, describing these changes as part of a broader transformation that helps prepare the body for extreme endurance flight.

This kind of preparation can seem almost impossible from a human perspective. Before migration, the body becomes organised around flight. Fat provides the main energy supply. Muscles and organs must support continuous movement. Digestive tissues that are useful while feeding become less useful during a journey when no feeding will occur. The phrase used in one influential study, “Guts don’t fly”, captured the idea neatly: for a bird about to cross an ocean, every gram matters.

Navigation is just as extraordinary as endurance. Migratory birds use a combination of inherited instincts and environmental cues, including the sun, stars, the Earth’s magnetic field, polarised light and weather conditions. These cues do not act like a simple map. Instead, birds appear to integrate multiple sources of information as they move through changing skies, wind systems and landscapes. Scientists understand many of these mechanisms, but the accuracy of first year migrants remains one of the most fascinating questions in migration biology.

Wind also matters. Long distance migrants are not simply battling across the sky by force alone. Research on Bar-tailed Godwits has shown that wind selection can help shape their migration, with birds using favourable atmospheric conditions to support enormous flights across the Pacific. This does not make the journey easy, but it shows that migration is not random. Timing, weather and inherited direction all influence whether a bird leaves, where it flies and how successfully it reaches the next part of its annual cycle.

For much of human history, the details of these journeys were hidden from view. People could see birds arrive and depart, but the space between those events was largely unknown. Lightweight satellite tracking changed that. Researchers can now follow individual birds across oceans, revealing routes, timing, flight duration and stopover behaviour in ways that were once impossible. B6 became famous because scientists were able to watch its journey unfold, but the greater lesson is that many birds are making extraordinary movements beyond our sight every year.

The story of B6 is therefore more than a record breaking flight. It is an entry point into one of the great biological systems on Earth. A bird that hatched on the Alaskan tundra was able to prepare its body, choose a departure window, navigate across the Pacific and remain airborne for more than eleven days. That journey is astonishing on its own, but it also raises the bigger question: where are these birds going?

Following Invisible Highways

A bird migration route is often described as a flyway, but a flyway is not simply a line on a map. It is a network of places used across the full annual cycle of migratory birds. It includes breeding grounds, stopover wetlands, staging areas and non breeding habitats. Each part of that network serves a different purpose, and each part must remain functional if the migration is to continue. A bird may breed in one country, refuel in another, spend the non breeding season thousands of kilometres away, and depend on all of those places within a single year.

For the birds that move through our part of the world, that network is the East Asian–Australasian Flyway (EAAF). It stretches from the Russian Far East and Alaska, south through East Asia and Southeast Asia, and on to Australia and New Zealand. The flyway encompasses 22 countries and supports more than 50 million migratory waterbirds from more than 250 populations. It is one of the great migration systems on Earth, linking Arctic breeding grounds with wetlands, coastlines and tidal flats across the Asia Pacific region.

This is where the story of B6 begins to grow beyond a single bird. B6’s flight was extraordinary because it was long, direct and recorded in remarkable detail. Yet it was not a random movement across the Pacific. It was part of a much larger migratory system used by millions of birds each year. Some species make spectacular non stop flights, while others move in stages, travelling between key wetlands where they can rest and rebuild their energy before continuing. The flyway is held together by these places. Without them, migration becomes far more difficult, and for some species eventually impossible.

Stopover sites are especially important because migration is not only about distance. It is also about fuel. Shorebirds that travel between breeding and non breeding areas must find enough food at the right times to build fat reserves for the next stage of their journey. A tidal flat, estuary or coastal wetland may appear ordinary to us, but for a migratory shorebird it can be the difference between continuing and failing. These places act like refuelling stations spread across an international route. If too many are lost, degraded or disturbed, the entire journey becomes less secure.

That is why habitat loss along the flyway has become such a serious conservation concern. Scientific research has linked rapid declines in several migratory shorebird species to the loss of tidal flat habitat, particularly around the Yellow Sea, one of the most important refuelling regions in the flyway. One major study found that Yellow Sea tidal mudflats had shrunk by more than 65 per cent in recent decades, and that shorebirds relying on those habitats were declining at rates that matched the loss of their refuelling sites.

The pressure is not limited to one region. Across the East Asian–Australasian Flyway, migratory shorebirds face a combination of habitat loss, coastal development, wetland degradation, disturbance, pollution, invasive species, hunting in some areas, and climate change. These threats can occur at different points in the same bird’s annual cycle. A species may breed successfully in the Arctic, but still decline if it cannot safely refuel during migration or find enough food on its non breeding grounds. Conservation therefore has to think across borders, because the birds themselves move across borders.

This is one of the reasons migratory shorebird conservation can be so difficult. Protecting one wetland is important, but it may not be enough if other critical sites along the route continue to disappear. A bird that depends on ten places across the year needs all ten to remain available in the right season and in good enough condition to support feeding and rest. The loss of one site may not cause an immediate collapse, but repeated losses across the flyway gradually weaken the system. Migration depends on continuity.

The East Asian–Australasian Flyway Partnership was created because this problem cannot be solved by one country alone. The Flyway Site Network now includes more than 130 sites across 22 countries, recognising wetlands that are important for migratory waterbirds and encouraging international cooperation to protect them. This does not mean every important site is fully secure, but it does reflect a crucial principle: migratory birds need conservation planning that matches the scale of their movements. Local habitats can have international importance.

For readers in Australia, the flyway can feel distant when described through places such as Alaska, Siberia, China, Korea or the Yellow Sea. Yet those places are part of the same ecological story as the birds that arrive on Australian shores each year. A shorebird feeding quietly on a mudflat may have already passed through several countries, depended on wetlands thousands of kilometres apart, and survived threats scattered across a hemisphere. By the time it reaches the southern end of the flyway, it is carrying the history of every place that allowed it to get there.

Understanding the flyway changes the way we see individual wetlands. They are not isolated patches of mud, sand, saltmarsh or shallow water. They are links in an international chain. Some may support large numbers of birds, while others may be important because they provide food, shelter or safe roosting at a particular point in the migration cycle. Their value is not measured only by how they appear to us, but by what they make possible for birds moving across the world.

Once we understand that migration is not a single heroic flight, but a vast network of connected places, Australia begins to look different. It is not just where some birds happen to spend part of the year. It is part of the system that allows these journeys to continue. And at the southern end of that system, Tasmania holds places that matter far beyond their size on a map.

Tasmania at the End of the Flyway

By the time migratory shorebirds reach Tasmania, they have completed one of the most demanding journeys in the natural world. For some species, the island marks the southern end of the East Asian–Australasian Flyway (EAAF). Although Tasmania can feel geographically isolated from the rest of the world, it occupies a remarkable position within this international network. For birds arriving from the Northern Hemisphere, it is not the edge of the world. It is exactly where they have been travelling to for thousands of years.

Tasmania’s coastline extends for more than 4,700 kilometres and includes hundreds of islands, estuaries, bays, tidal lagoons and sheltered inlets. While these places differ in appearance, many share one important characteristic. Twice each day, the movement of the tide exposes vast areas of mud, sand and seagrass that support extraordinary numbers of marine worms, molluscs, crustaceans and other invertebrates. To most visitors they appear as quiet coastal landscapes. To a migratory shorebird that has just completed an ocean crossing, they are essential feeding grounds where depleted energy reserves can be rebuilt before the next stage of the annual cycle.

Not every wetland plays the same role. Some support relatively small numbers of birds, while others regularly hold internationally significant populations. Under internationally recognised Ramsar criteria, a wetland is considered internationally important if it regularly supports at least one per cent of the population of a migratory waterbird species or at least 20,000 waterbirds. These thresholds recognise that certain locations contribute disproportionately to the survival of migratory species and therefore have conservation importance far beyond their physical size.

Several Tasmanian wetlands already receive international recognition. Pitt Water–Orielton Lagoon, near Hobart, is listed under the Ramsar Convention and supports around thirty bird species protected under international migratory bird agreements. Moulting Lagoon, on Tasmania’s east coast, is another Ramsar wetland recognised for its extensive estuarine habitats and importance to resident and migratory waterbirds. Flinders Island’s Logan Lagoon also holds Ramsar status and forms part of the wider network of coastal wetlands used by migratory shorebirds moving through Bass Strait. Together, these wetlands demonstrate that Tasmania is not represented by a single important site, but by a network of habitats supporting birds at different stages of their annual journeys.

Yet among all of Tasmania’s shorebird habitats, one landscape consistently stands apart. The Robbins Passage–Boullanger Bay wetland complex, on the state’s north west coast, is widely recognised as the most important shorebird site in Tasmania. Covering approximately 28,000 hectares, it is the state’s largest coastal wetland system and supports extensive tidal flats, saltmarsh and around 7,500 hectares of seagrass. During the austral summer, more than 25,000 resident and migratory shorebirds use this landscape, making it one of the most significant shorebird habitats in southern Australia. University of Tasmania research has identified Robbins Passage–Boullanger Bay as the state’s premier shorebird site, while BirdLife Australia has recognised the area as a Key Biodiversity Area because of the globally important numbers of birds it supports.

The importance of Robbins Passage is not measured simply by the number of birds present. Different species depend on different parts of the wetland throughout the tidal cycle. As the tide retreats, birds spread across the exposed mudflats to feed. As it returns, they move to higher roosting areas where they rest and conserve energy before feeding again on the next low tide. This constant movement between feeding and roosting habitats means the ecological value of the wetland cannot be understood by looking at a single beach or mudflat in isolation. It functions as one interconnected system. Research undertaken within Robbins Passage has shown that the distribution of shorebirds closely reflects the availability of prey and the physical characteristics of the tidal flats themselves.

Understanding Tasmania’s wetlands in this broader context changes the way they are viewed. They are not simply scenic coastal landscapes or isolated conservation reserves. Each forms part of an international chain of habitats stretching from the Arctic to the Southern Hemisphere. A bird feeding on a Tasmanian mudflat may have departed Alaska or Siberia only weeks earlier. Another may soon begin preparing for the equally demanding return journey north. The success of those migrations depends not on a single spectacular flight, but on the continued health of every important wetland along the way.

Why Mud Matters

At low tide, vast areas of Tasmania’s coastline are transformed. Water retreats from the shore, exposing broad expanses of mud and sand that, to many people, appear quiet and lifeless. These tidal flats are rarely considered destinations in their own right. They lack the dramatic scenery of rugged cliffs or sandy beaches, and at first glance can seem little more than stretches of exposed sediment waiting for the tide to return. Yet beneath the surface lies one of the most productive ecosystems in the coastal environment. For migratory shorebirds, these mudflats are not empty landscapes. They are the reason birds travel thousands of kilometres to reach them.

The productivity of a tidal flat begins with the tide itself. Twice each day, incoming seawater delivers nutrients, organic matter and microscopic life across the intertidal zone. As the tide retreats, these materials remain within the sediments, supporting an extraordinary community of organisms collectively known as benthic macroinvertebrates. Hidden beneath only a few centimetres of mud are polychaete worms, small bivalves, snails, amphipods, crabs and other invertebrates that spend much of their lives buried in the sediment. Although individually small, together they represent an enormous reservoir of food that has developed over thousands of years through the continual exchange between land and sea.

These invertebrates are the foundation of the entire system. Shorebirds do not feed on mud. They feed on the life within it. A Bar-tailed Godwit probes deeply into the sediment with its long bill in search of marine worms and shellfish. Smaller species such as Red-necked Stints and Curlew Sandpipers target tiny crustaceans, molluscs and other invertebrates closer to the surface. Pied Oystercatchers specialise in larger shellfish, using their powerful bills to prise open prey hidden beneath the sediment. Different species have evolved different bill lengths, shapes and feeding techniques, allowing many birds to forage side by side while targeting different prey.

This relationship between birds and their food is remarkably precise. Research undertaken in the Robbins Passage wetlands found that shorebirds were not randomly distributed across the tidal flats. Their numbers closely reflected local environmental conditions, including the abundance and diversity of invertebrate prey, sediment characteristics, tidal position and the presence of seagrass. Even within the same wetland, different parts of the tidal flat supported different bird communities because the food available beneath the surface also differed. In other words, birds were responding to subtle ecological differences that are largely invisible to the human eye.

One of the strongest patterns identified by the Robbins Passage research was the importance of the lower intertidal zone and the water’s edge. These areas consistently supported the greatest densities of feeding shorebirds because they provided optimal access to prey as the tide moved across the flats. Shorebird behaviour therefore changes continuously throughout the tidal cycle. As the tide falls, birds spread across newly exposed feeding areas. As it rises again, they gradually retreat towards higher ground, eventually gathering at roosting sites where they conserve energy until the next feeding opportunity. The rhythm of their day is dictated not by the clock, but by the tide.

Seagrass also plays a more important role than many people realise. Although shorebirds rarely feed on the plants themselves, seagrass beds influence the abundance and composition of invertebrate communities living within surrounding sediments. They stabilise the seabed, trap organic material and create habitat for many of the organisms that shorebirds consume. The extensive seagrass meadows within Robbins Passage are therefore not simply another coastal habitat. They help support the food web that makes the wetland so valuable to migratory birds.

The availability of food has consequences that extend far beyond a single estuary. A migratory shorebird arriving after an ocean crossing has depleted much of the energy accumulated before departure. Rebuilding those reserves quickly is essential. Birds that cannot find sufficient food may delay migration, depart in poorer physical condition or experience reduced survival and breeding success. Research across the East Asian–Australasian Flyway (EAAF) has repeatedly shown that declines in food resources, whether caused by habitat loss, altered water flows or changes in sediment ecology, can have population-level consequences for migratory shorebirds. Protecting feeding habitat therefore means protecting the food supply that makes migration possible.

Understanding mudflats in this way changes how they are perceived. Their value does not lie in the mud itself, but in the extraordinary biological communities living beneath the surface. What appears to be an empty tidal flat is, in reality, an immense feeding ground supporting birds that have travelled from the Arctic and will soon undertake the return journey north. These are not vacant stretches of coastline awaiting development or disturbance. They are functioning ecosystems whose productivity has been shaped by tides, sediments, plants and invertebrates over countless generations.

When Conservation Goals Collide

Throughout this article, one message has emerged repeatedly. The survival of migratory shorebirds depends on much more than their remarkable ability to fly thousands of kilometres. Their survival depends on a chain of healthy habitats stretching across continents, with every breeding ground, stopover wetland and non breeding site contributing to one of the world’s great migration systems. The loss or degradation of any significant link in that chain has the potential to affect birds far beyond the boundaries of a single country.

Few places illustrate that principle more clearly than Robbins Island and the adjoining wetlands of Robbins Passage and Boullanger Bay. Together they form Tasmania’s most important shorebird landscape, supporting the state’s largest aggregation of migratory shorebirds and more than twenty species of transcontinental migratory waders. During summer, more than 25,000 resident and migratory shorebirds utilise the extensive intertidal mudflats, saltmarshes and seagrass meadows that characterise the wetland complex. These are the same productive feeding habitats discussed in the previous section. Without them, many birds would simply be unable to complete their annual migration.

The ecological significance of the area extends well beyond migratory shorebirds. Robbins Island supports an isolated wild population of Tasmanian devils that remains free from Devil Facial Tumour Disease, making it one of the most important strongholds for the species anywhere in Tasmania. The surrounding landscape also supports breeding Tasmanian Wedge-tailed Eagles, White-bellied Sea Eagles, habitat used by the critically endangered Orange-bellied Parrot during migration, and an exceptional diversity of marine life associated with the wetland system. Few coastal landscapes in Tasmania bring together such a concentration of nationally and internationally significant conservation values.

It is precisely because of these values that Robbins Island has become the focus of national attention. Unlike many environmental disputes, the central question is not whether conservation matters. Rather, it is how conservation should respond when two important environmental objectives intersect. The proposed Robbins Island Renewable Energy Park forms part of Australia’s transition away from fossil fuels by generating up to 900 megawatts of renewable electricity. Climate change itself is recognised as one of the greatest long term threats facing biodiversity, affecting ecosystems through changing temperatures, altered rainfall patterns, rising sea levels and increasing frequency of extreme weather events. In this instance, protecting wildlife today and reducing future climate impacts are both legitimate conservation goals.

Resolving that tension became the central task of the Commonwealth’s assessment under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. Rather than treating the proposal as a simple choice between development and conservation, the assessment considered whether the project could proceed under conditions designed to avoid, minimise and manage impacts on nationally protected species. The approval includes extensive legally binding requirements covering migratory shorebirds, the Orange-bellied Parrot, Tasmanian devils, Tasmanian Wedge-tailed Eagles and other protected fauna. These conditions require years of pre-construction surveys, comprehensive bird and bat management plans, adaptive operational measures, habitat protection, long term monitoring and biosecurity measures intended to prevent Devil Facial Tumour Disease reaching the island’s disease free devil population.

Despite these conditions, the proposal continues to generate genuine scientific and community debate. Some researchers and conservation organisations remain concerned about collision risk, habitat disturbance, cumulative impacts and the uncertainty that inevitably accompanies any major infrastructure project within an internationally significant wetland system. Others argue that extensive environmental assessment, adaptive management and legally enforceable conditions provide an appropriate framework for balancing biodiversity protection with the urgent need to expand renewable energy generation. Both perspectives begin from the same premise: that Robbins Island is an exceptionally important landscape deserving careful consideration.

Long before any development proposal was conceived, Robbins Passage formed part of an ecological network linking Tasmania with the Arctic through the annual migration of millions of shorebirds. That significance exists independently of any planning decision. It is written into the tides, the mudflats, the seagrass meadows and the extraordinary journeys of the birds that depend upon them. Any discussion about the future of Robbins Island should begin with that understanding.

Looking Beyond Robbins Island

Robbins Island is not the only place where these questions matter. It is one example of a much larger conservation challenge playing out across the East Asian–Australasian Flyway (EAAF). Migratory shorebirds do not belong to one country, one coastline or one wetland. A bird that breeds in Alaska or Siberia may depend on tidal flats in East Asia, stopover wetlands in Southeast Asia, and non breeding habitat in Australia or New Zealand within the same annual cycle. Protecting that bird therefore requires conservation systems that operate across borders, because the migration itself crosses borders.

The East Asian–Australasian Flyway Partnership exists because no single nation can protect these birds alone. The Partnership describes the flyway as stretching from the Russian Far East and Alaska, through East Asia and Southeast Asia, to Australia and New Zealand. It encompasses 22 countries and supports tens of millions of migratory waterbirds from more than 250 populations. During migration, these birds rely on a system of highly productive wetlands where they can rest and feed before continuing their journey. International cooperation is therefore not an optional extra. It is built into the biology of the birds themselves.

The Flyway Site Network is one of the main ways that important habitats are recognised within that international system. Sites can qualify because they regularly support more than 20,000 migratory waterbirds, more than one per cent of a population of a species or subspecies, appreciable numbers of an endangered or vulnerable population, or important staging concentrations. As of November 2025, the network included 159 sites across 19 countries, with Australia contributing 25 of those sites. These figures matter because they show that individual wetlands are not isolated conservation units. They are part of a mapped network of places that collectively support migration.

The Ramsar Convention provides another layer of international recognition for wetlands. Adopted in 1971 and in force since 1975, the Convention on Wetlands is an intergovernmental treaty that provides a framework for the conservation and wise use of wetlands and their resources. Ramsar-listed wetlands are recognised as being of significant value not only to the country in which they occur, but to humanity as a whole. The listing of a Ramsar site also represents a government commitment to maintain its ecological character, which is why Ramsar wetlands often sit at the centre of discussions about migratory birds, coastal development and long-term habitat protection.

The Ramsar Convention also recognises that wetland conservation depends on cooperation between countries. Article 5 of the Convention requires contracting parties to consult with each other when wetlands or water systems extend across national borders, and to coordinate policies concerning the conservation of wetlands and their flora and fauna. Although every wetland exists in a particular local landscape, many of the species that depend upon them move across national boundaries. For migratory shorebirds, this means that conservation responsibility is shared. A wetland protected in one country cannot fully compensate for the loss of critical habitat in another.

Australia’s responsibility within the flyway is also reflected in international migratory bird agreements with Japan, China and the Republic of Korea. These agreements recognise that migratory birds and their habitats require cooperation between the countries they move between. For Australia, this means that shorebird conservation is not simply a domestic issue. It is connected to international commitments, shared research, habitat protection and the recognition that birds moving through the flyway depend on decisions made across many jurisdictions.

Science has become one of the most important tools for making that cooperation meaningful. Satellite tracking has revealed routes that were once invisible, showing how individual birds move between breeding grounds, stopover sites and non breeding habitats across entire oceans. Long-term shorebird counts and population monitoring help identify which species are declining, which sites are most important, and where conservation action is most urgently needed. Without this information, migration would still appear as a seasonal arrival and departure. With it, migration becomes a measurable system that can be studied, mapped and, with enough commitment, better protected.

Citizen science also plays an important role in this work. Many shorebird surveys depend on people who return to the same beaches, estuaries and wetlands year after year, recording which species are present and how numbers change over time. These counts may seem modest when viewed individually, but together they create long-term datasets that professional scientists and conservation planners could not easily gather alone. For migratory species that move across enormous distances, repeated observations from local sites become part of a much larger picture.

The need for this monitoring is urgent because migratory shorebirds continue to face pressure throughout the flyway. Habitat loss and degradation remain major threats, particularly where tidal flats are reclaimed or altered. Disturbance, pollution, invasive species, hunting in some regions and changes to food availability can all affect survival. Climate change adds another layer of risk by altering coastal habitats, sea levels, weather patterns and the timing of ecological events. A species may still be able to fly thousands of kilometres, but that ability means little if the places it depends upon are disappearing or changing faster than it can adapt.

This is why the future of migratory shorebirds cannot be separated from the future of the places they use. Protecting a species like the Bar-tailed Godwit is not only a question of protecting the bird itself. It requires protecting Arctic breeding grounds, international staging areas, tidal flats, saltmarshes, estuaries and coastal wetlands across the full length of the flyway. Each place performs a different role. Each must remain available at the right time of year. Conservation fails when the chain is broken often enough that even the strongest migrants can no longer complete the journey.

Understanding these birds is therefore the first step towards protecting them. A mudflat is easier to dismiss when it is seen only as mud. A distant Arctic breeding ground is easier to ignore when it feels unrelated to life in Australia. A small brown bird feeding at low tide is easier to overlook when its journey is unknown. Once the full migration is understood, those same places and birds become part of something much larger. Robbins Island is one example, but the lesson extends far beyond one island, one development proposal or one conservation debate. These birds remind us that the natural world is connected at a scale far greater than any single map can show.

The Next Journey Begins

Somewhere on the Alaskan tundra, another Bar-tailed Godwit has already hatched. It will spend the first weeks of its life in a landscape that is only briefly suitable for breeding, where long summer daylight and seasonal bursts of insect life allow shorebirds to raise their young before the cold returns. Within a few months, that young bird will begin preparing for a journey it has never made before. It will feed, grow, build the reserves needed for flight, and then leave the breeding grounds as generations of Bar-tailed Godwits have done before it.

For a juvenile bird, this first migration is perhaps the most remarkable part of the story. B6 had never crossed the Pacific before. It had never been to Tasmania. Yet in October 2022, the young Bar-tailed Godwit departed Alaska and remained airborne for just over eleven days, covering more than 13,500 kilometres before reaching Tasmania. Its journey became famous because a satellite transmitter allowed researchers to follow it. The migration itself was not new. The technology simply allowed people to see, in extraordinary detail, what these birds are capable of doing.

Another bird will make that journey again. It may not follow exactly the same path. It may not be tracked by satellite. It may never appear in a news story or be given a tag number that people remember. Yet it will still be part of the same migration system, moving between Arctic breeding grounds and the wetlands of the Southern Hemisphere. It will navigate using inherited instincts, environmental cues and weather systems that scientists are still working to fully understand. It will cross borders without knowing they exist, depending on places scattered across a flyway that stretches through more than twenty countries.

When it finally reaches Australia, its survival will depend on what remains waiting for it. It will need tidal flats rich with worms, shellfish, crustaceans and other invertebrates. It will need places to feed at low tide and safe places to roost as the water returns. It will need wetlands that have not been lost, degraded or disturbed beyond their capacity to support the birds that arrive each year. The strength of the migration is not measured only in the bird’s wings. It is also measured in the health of the habitats beneath them.

That is why places like Robbins Passage, Pitt Water, Orielton Lagoon, Moulting Lagoon and the many smaller wetlands along Tasmania’s coast matter. They are not simply places where birds happen to appear for part of the year. They are part of the living infrastructure of migration. Their mudflats, saltmarshes, seagrass beds and sheltered roosts help make these journeys possible. A bird that has crossed an ocean does not arrive looking for scenery. It arrives needing food, safety and time.

B6 showed what is possible when instinct, physiology, weather and habitat align. A bird only months old left the Alaskan tundra and crossed the Pacific to Tasmania without stopping. That achievement belongs to the bird, but it also belongs to every place that made such a migration possible. The breeding grounds, the flyway, the feeding habitats and the wetlands at the end of the journey are all part of the same story.

The next Bar-tailed Godwit is already somewhere within that cycle. It may be feeding on the tundra, waiting for the right conditions to depart, or already moving south across the Pacific. The question is not whether another bird will attempt the journey. It will. The question is whether the places it depends upon today will still be there when it arrives.

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Editorial Note: Wild Island is committed to publishing accurate, evidence based wildlife information. This article has been researched using authoritative sources, including government agencies, scientific institutions and peer reviewed literature. The information in this article was verified at the time of publication and will be updated if significant new evidence or guidance becomes available.