Thank you for reading my blog. I hope you are having a really good day.
All of us like champions. Champions are the ones who come in first place in a contest -- such as a race, a football game, gymnastics or any event involving multiple participants. I once came in first place in a bunny hop, but there were only two of us involved, and the other one got tired of hopping, and laid down for a nap. Of course we were only two years old at the time, so no one was really watching anyway.
But there is one champion you probably never heard of. It is the Arctic Tern. That's a small bird that nests in the Arctic Circle -- which is a place very near the North Pole. Get your parents to show you on a globe of the World where that is. It's really cold up there, so I have no idea why it wants to nest there, but it does. Maybe it's because while it's there it is almost always daylight - that part of the year in Summer when the sun shines 20 - 24 hours a day. Personally, I'd find it hard to sleep if the sun almost never sets, but maybe it helps the Arctic Tern, as then it has more daylight hours during which to feed, and it needs to feed a lot, as it has to eat an awful lot of food to have the energy to do what it is the champion at doing. And that is migrating.
When a bird migrates, it flies from one place to another. The birds in your yard might live in the Northern States, like Minnesota, in the Summer when it's warm up there, but then migrate to the Southern States, like Georgia, where I live, in the Winter when it gets to cold, and there's too much snow up North.
Well the Arctic Circle might be OK for the Arctic Tern in June, July and August, but when it starts getting cold in September, they will start flying South. But they don't stop in the Southern United States. They will fly 150 miles a day for months until they make it all the way to Antartica -- the exact other side of the World. Again, get your parents to show you on a World Globe just how far that is. And the good part about it for the Arctic Tern is that when they get to Antartica, it's Summer down there, January, February and March, and the sun shines 22-24 hours a day, just like it did in the Arctic Circle six months earlier.
Then, when it starts getting cold in Antartica, they turn around and fly back North, all the way to where they had came from -- the Arctic Circle. And why does that make them Champions? It's because that's a total of 22,000 miles they fly in one year, which is farther than any other bird on Planet Earth ever flies in a year's time.
By the way, fishermen all along the route they fly love to see them come by their fishing boats. It's because the Arctic Tern will fly really close to the surface of the ocean looking for small fish swimming near the surface. When they spot them, they will drop low enough to scoop up a fish from the surface and swallow it while flying. When the fishermen see this, they know that there are bigger fish just a little lower than the little fish that are chasing the little fish to the surface, and they will know just where to cast their nets to catch those bigger fish.
You know, it's nice to see a champion helping others like that. We should be sure that even if we become a champion, we should always be ready to help others.
Keep your chin up.
Robert P. Rabbit