These Valentine birds travel across oceans to reunite with their mate
- - These Valentine birds travel across oceans to reunite with their mate
Phaedra Trethan, USA TODAYFebruary 14, 2026 at 6:01 AM
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How far would you go for a summer love? Across an ocean? Over a continent? How about both?
For Lindsay and Katakturuk, their yearly meetup in the Arctic each summer means a journey north from Colombia and Brazil, respectively. Lindsay prefers the Pacific route, traveling along the coasts of Mexico, California, Canada and Alaska. Katakturuk opts for the Atlantic, making his way over thousands of miles of ocean, then journeying across west across Canada to meet his one true love.
We should perhaps mention that Lindsay and Katakturuk are birds. Hudsonian whimbrels, to be exact, shorebirds about the size of crows with long, thin, slightly curved beaks.
Researchers with an Alaska-based conservation nonprofit discovered that this pair, despite living separate lives each winter and taking separate routes to their annual reunions, is able to find one another when it's time to set up housekeeping and start a new generation of wee whimbrels.
But they still have a lot more to learn about the birds.
Not lovebirds, but maybe birds in love?
Daniel Ruthrauff is a Colorado native who's lived in Alaska since 1996. He holds a PhD animal ecology and has studied shorebirds and their migration for years, having worked with the U.S. Geological Survey for decades before retiring from the agency during last year's round of DOGE cuts.
A Hudsonian whimbrel rests Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.
He's been with Manomet Conservation Sciences since then, taking on the work of a colleague, Shiloh Schulte, who'd tagged and tracked Lindsay and Katakturuk. Schulte had given the two birds their names, as well − they're known as EY2 and EY5 on their tags, which, as Ruthrauff admitted with a chuckle, "is not very poetic."
Schulte died in June in a helicopter crash, but during his career "he did a lot of trailblazing things," Ruthrauff said, including managing to tag both whimbrels in a mating pair − something Ruthrauff said is very hard to do.
Shiloh Schulte, who died in a helicopter crash in June 2025, worked to track Hudsonian whimbrels, including Katakturuk, the bird he's holding in this photo.
Hudsonian whimbrels are monogamous and mate for life, and that can mean as many as 20 years of meetups up in the Arctic, Ruthrauff said. They feed by poking their long bills into the sand at the water's edge, pulling up crabs and other invertebrates. In the winter and while migrating, they tend to stay near beaches, marshes and small islands. During the summer mating season, though, they can be found nesting on the Arctic tundra.
Separated in winter, reunited in summer
Lindsay's and Katakturuk's separate but convergent journeys "surprised us," said Ruthrauff. "All the tracking work we'd done before showed us they use the Pacific flyway. We thought they were Pacific birds."
A pair of Hudsonian whimbrels are in flight. The birds mate for life and follow one of two migratory patterns along either the Atlantic or the Pacific seaboard.
But in 2019, researchers found a whimbrel who took the Atlantic route, and they soon realized that the birds used more than one way to get to their semi-frozen summer destination.
"We saw that some go one way and some go another, and thought there might be something going on that was previously unbeknownst to us," Ruthrauff said.
Schulte tagged nine mating pairs in Alaska and tracked them for three years. Now Ruthrauff and his colleagues believe the birds don't winter together. They migrate separately, too. Tracking can be tricky, though: Ruthrauff explained that it's hard to fit birds with trackers that are small enough not to interfere with their behavior, but also reliable and sturdy enough to withstand the rigors of migration and the elements.
"They're very difficult to study," he admitted.
A map provided by Manomet Conservation Sciences shows two Hudsonian whimbrels' migrations from South America to the Arctic.
Whimbrels and other migratory birds face challenges including climate change, which is making hurricanes and tropical storms more frequent and more intense; rising sea levels; hunting, for both subsistence and sport; and habitat loss. All of those factors can affect populations and migratory patterns, and whether the birds can survive and find enough places to rest, feed and breed.
Whimbrel populations have dropped 75% since 1980, Ruthrauff noted.
Still, larger shorebirds can have very long lifespans: Ruthrauff noted that Wisdom, an albatross who spends its mating season on the Midway Atoll, is believed to be at least 74 years old. That resilience points to some ability to adapt, he said.
"That gives me a lot of hope," he said. "Climate change is happening so fast, but they do seem to be good at what they do, they can live for a long time and in some ways learn to accommodate these changes."
And meet up each summer to create a new generation.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How far would you go to reunite with your Valentine?
Source: “AOL Breaking”
