Arctic tern completes longest journey every recorded

Although extraordinary performances were seen in Rio, human athletic feats are in the halfpenny place compared to those of wild creatures; an Arctic tern has just completed the longest annual journey known to have been made by any living thing, writes Richard Collins

In 2015, researchers from Newcastle University fitted geo-locators to 29 terns at a breeding colony on the Farne Islands off Northumberland. The tiny devices logged the positions of the birds from day to day. Sixteen of the terns were recaptured back at the colony this summer and their locators retrieved. One of the units revealed that, on leaving the breeding colony, the tern had flown south along the west coasts of Europe and Africa.

It rounded the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean and worked its way down to the east coast of Antarctica, arriving there twelve weeks after it had set out. Last April, the bird headed back to the southern tip of Africa and up the Atlantic seaboard to the North Sea coast of England. By the time it reached the Farne Islands, this gold-medal- winner had flown 96,000km.