World’s Highest Flying Bird Can Scale Himalayas
The world’s highest flying bird is an Asian goose that can fly up and over the Himalaya in only about eight hours, a new study finds. The Bar-headed Goose (Anser indicus) is “very pretty, but I guess it doesn’t look like a superathlete,” said study co-author Lucy Hawkes, a biologist at Bangor University in the United Kingdom.
In 2009, Hawkes and an international team of researchers tagged 25 bar-headed geese in India with GPS transmitters. Shortly thereafter, the birds left on their annual spring migration to Mongolia and surrounding areas to breed. To get there, the geese have to fly over the Himalaya—the world’s tallest mountain range and home to the tallest mountain on Earth, Mount Everest, which rises to 29,035 feet (8,850 meters)…
(read more: National Geo)
