Rivka Galchen's Wonderful "Flight Risk"

Photo by Ash Adams, from Rivka Galchen's "Flight Risk"

I want to take a quick look back at a piece that appeared in the September 21, 2026 New Yorker. I didn’t give it any attention at the time due to my boycott of all things American, including The New Yorker. I want to rectify that now. The piece is Rivka Galchen’s “Flight Risk.” It’s a report on an amazing shorebird called the Hudsonian godwit. It begins,

On a sunny June morning, in a bog outside Beluga, Alaska, I met a Hudsonian godwit. She had inky eyes and a long, slightly upturned beak that was pinkish-orange at its base and brownish-black at its tip. The feathers on her back were of mottled sepia tones, and those on her belly were rusty brown and painterly white. Her legs reminded me of the slender inserts of spring-loaded ballpoint pens, and her feet were refined pterodactyl claws. Her name (among humans) was A34, and she was about the size of a city pigeon. She was in the hands of Nathan Senner, a conservation biologist, who removed and replaced her geotag; measured her head, beak, wing, and leg; weighed her; and took two tail feathers and a sample of her blood. From that small number of data points, he can deduce where she’s been, how her feathers have grown, what genetic subgroup she belongs to, and her degree of exposure to mercury.

What a wonderful lede! I read it and just kept going all the way to the end. Along the way, I learned that Hudsonian godwits make the longest non-stop migration in the bird world - 10,000 miles from Patagonia to Alaska. That’s an astounding distance for a little bird to fly, especially when you consider that godwits cannot soar like hawks or glide like albatrosses. Galchen writes, “They migrate by continuously flapping their wings. They must navigate crosswinds and headwinds, storms and maybe an occasional hurricane, continuing on day after day, night after night.”

My favourite part of Galchen’s piece is her description of actually holding a Hudsonian godwit in her hand:

She was warmer than I expected a bird to be. I could feel her heartbeat. When I was in elementary school, I briefly shared an elevator with the actor Robert Wagner, whom I recognized from the TV show “Hart to Hart.” He caught my eye and said hello. The encounter was otherworldly and wondrous. Holding A34 felt something like that. Then I opened my hands and she took off, back to her clutch of eggs, which, if not eaten by a coyote or a sandhill crane or another hungry creature, would soon hatch. 

What a rare, vital, pulsing, elating moment! One of the loveliest things I’ve read this year.