These geese go over and above on their migratory journey

Bird

'They essentially run a marathon on top of the world – which we can’t do,' said McMaster biologist Graham Scott, who specialize in the study of animals in extreme environments. He's been travelling to Mongolia almost every year since 2007 to monitor bar-headed geese.


Most birds fly around the Himalayas. Bar-headed geese fly over them.

The extreme altitude of Everest and its neighbours features so little oxygen and such frigid temperatures that most birds take the long way, skirting the massive mountain range during migratory flights.

Somehow, the bar-headed goose, heavier than 98 per cent of other birds, is able to negotiate the extreme physical challenges of flying at more than 6 km above sea level, and makes the trip between Mongolia and India twice a year by flying direct.

Small wonder that the accomplishment would attract the attention of McMaster biologist Graham Scott, who specializes in studying how animals cope with extreme environments.

Scott has been visiting the birds’ breeding grounds in Mongolia nearly annually since 2007, where he has been part of a team of scientists learning more about how the birds do it.

Graham Scott

McMaster researcher Graham Scott. 

He is one of several international authors, and only one of three Canadians, to collaborate on a new paper that is the cover story in the latest issue of the journal Science, describing the mystery of the birds’ flight over the imposing mountain range, an ongoing project with potentially far-reaching implications.

“They essentially run a marathon on top of the world – which we can’t do,” Scott said.

As the scientists continue to study exactly how the geese manage to wring so much effort from so little oxygen, he says the goal is to find lessons that could help humans overcome oxygen deprivation that is a component of many illnesses and conditions, including asthma.

Part of Scott’s role in the project was to capture subject birds and surgically implant each of them with a small monitor a little bigger than an AA battery, which tracked the birds and recorded vital statics such as heartbeat and abdominal temperatures.

A year later, he’d help round up the birds, marked with numbered collars, and extract the recorders to analyze their contents.

The birds, as it turns out, follow a roller-coaster path over the mountains, likely dropping down into richer air and taking advantage of updrafts as they climb back to higher altitudes. The repeated ascents are the most demanding legs of the journey, which Scott compares to trying to sprint uphill in thin, freezing air, and yet the jagged profile of their flights is ultimately more efficient than reaching altitude and flying straight across, as a passenger jet would do.

The next stage of the work will be to understand more about how the birds’ breathing, heartbeat, metabolism and temperature combine to make it possible.