The Godwits and Deep Time
13,000 kilometers in a single journey that takes seven to nine days
So here I am, nearly seventy-four years old, and I find myself thinking about time more than I used to. Not in the anxious way you might expect... more like a curious accountant who's discovered the books don't quite add up the way he thought they would.
When you're young, a year feels like an eternity. Summer vacation stretched out like the Sahara Desert. Now? Blink twice and it's Christmas again. The decades pile up like unopened mail, and you start to wonder what time actually is, besides the thing that makes your knees crack more than they used to.
Which brings me to the bar-tailed godwit, a bird I've been watching here in New Zealand during the southern summer. If you want to feel simultaneously inspired and insignificant, watch these birds for a while.
Every year, these modest-looking shorebirds... about the size of a small chicken, brownish, nothing you'd give a second glance at... fly from the Arctic to New Zealand. Without stops. They fly non-stop from Alaska across the entire Pacific Ocean, covering up to 13,000 kilometers in a single journey that takes seven to nine days. No breaks. No snacks.
To put this in perspective, imagine running a marathon. Now imagine running it 315 times in a row without stopping. Congratulations, you're thinking like a godwit.
They lose half their body weight during the flight. Their organs shrink to save energy. Their flight muscles expand. They are, essentially, turning themselves into the very essence of streamlined bones and muscle in flight. Then they arrive here, fatten up on New Zealand shellfish and marine worms (which sounds terrible but works for them), and eventually fly back to the Arctic to breed. Different route, mind you. They take the scenic path home through Asia. Because why not add a few thousand extra kilometers?
The question that haunts me, standing on a New Zealand beach watching these birds probe the mud for food, is this: How did they ever figure this out?
Here's what the scientists tell us, and I swear I'm not making this up. Bar-tailed godwits evolved their Arctic-to-New Zealand migration through gradual range expansion over the past 2-3 million years during Pleistocene glacial cycles, when ancestral shorebirds with progressively longer migration capabilities were naturally selected as shifting climates and sea levels repeatedly altered suitable breeding and wintering habitats across the Pacific flyway.
Which is a fancy way of saying: They didn't figure it out. Time figured it out for them.
This is where we need to talk about deep time, a concept that should be taught in schools right after addition and before heartbreak.
Charles Lyell, a geologist with magnificent sideburns (this was the 1830s, when facial hair seemed to boost mental faculties), was one of the first people to really understand deep time. Before Lyell, most people thought Earth was maybe 6,000 years old. Lyell looked at rock layers and inexplicable fossils and said, basically, "Folks, we're going to need a bigger calendar."
He proposed that Earth was shaped not by sudden catastrophes (though those happen too), but mainly by slow, steady processes operating over unimaginable stretches of time. Just like today. Water wearing down mountains. Sediment piling up. Entire continents drifting like very slow, very large ships. (I'll dig into plate tectonics some other time.)
Deep time is the kind of time that makes human history look like a sneeze. We're talking millions and billions of years. Time so long that mountains rise up and wear down again. Seas come and go. Species appear, flourish, and vanish like mayflies. 99% no longer exist.
Try to picture a million years. Go ahead, I'll wait.
You can't, can you? Neither can I. Our brains didn't evolve to comprehend that kind of duration. We can say "a million years" but we can't feel it. It's like trying to imagine the size of the universe or understanding why anyone would supersize their burgers.
If you really want to wrap your mind around Earth's 4.5 billion year history, there's an NPR video called "Earth's Entire History (Visualized On A Football Field)" that does it better than anything I've come across. They map the entire timeline onto a 100-yard football field, where every inch represents about 1.3 million years. I strongly encourage everyone to view this to gain a better understanding of how life has evolved on Earth.
Spoiler alert: humans don't show up until you're nearly at the goal line. All of recorded history happens in the width of a blade of grass. It's humbling in the best possible way.
Deep time is everywhere if you know how to look for it. It's in the fossils pressed into the rocks. It's in the DNA of every living thing, which carries a record of ancestry stretching back to the first cells that figured out how to copy themselves. It's in the migration routes of birds who are following paths carved out by glaciers that melted before humans invented writing, agriculture, or arguing about politics on the internet.
The godwits' migration didn't happen because one clever bird discovered New Zealand and told its friends. It happened because over millions of years, thousands of generations, the birds that could fly a little farther survived better. Maybe they found food sources others missed. Maybe they avoided predators. Gradually, impossibly, the route extended. Alaska to Russia. Russia to Japan. Japan to Australia. Australia to New Zealand.
Each generation slightly better adapted than the last. Small changes accumulating like compound interest in a savings account you forgot you had. Except instead of money, you get the ability to fly across an ocean without stopping.
This is natural selection, Darwin's beautiful and slightly disturbing idea. Beautiful because it explains the magnificent complexity of life without requiring a committee meeting. Disturbing because it runs on failure and death. The birds that couldn't make the journey didn't get to pass on their genes. Evolution is an artist that works in extinction.
Sitting on a beach, watching these birds, I'm struck by the layers of time involved. There's my time... seventy-four years, feeling longer and shorter than it should. There's the godwit's time... the annual cycle of migration, timed to seasons with absolute precision. There's evolutionary time... the 2-3 million years it took to develop this migration route. And there's geological time... the hundreds of millions of years that created the Pacific Ocean these birds now cross in one shot.
We share this planet with creatures whose stories make ours look like footnotes. The coelacanth, a fish thought extinct for 66 million years until someone caught one in 1938 (I remember staring in awe at the original specimen in East London Museum, South Africa). Horseshoe crabs have been scuttling around largely unchanged for 450 million years. They've survived multiple mass extinctions. They've seen mountains rise and fall. They've outlasted dinosaurs, ice ages, and disco.
And yet, here we are, humans, been around in our current form for maybe 300,000 years (a cosmic eyeblink), and we think we own the place. We've named everything, catalogued everything, stuck everything in categories like we're organizing a really complicated closet. It's very sweet, really. Like a toddler organizing blocks by color and thinking they've discovered order in the universe.
The truth is, we're newcomers at a very old party. The planet was doing just fine before we showed up with our cities and our smartphones and our strong opinions about which way the toilet paper should hang. It will do fine after we're gone, too, though hopefully that's a long way off (not that we're doing much to improve our odds).
Understanding deep time changes how you see everything. That mountain isn't permanent... it's just slow. The coastline isn't fixed... it's just patient. The species around us aren't finished products... they're works in progress, drafts being edited by the very patient hand of natural selection.
It should make us humble, this knowledge. It mostly doesn't, but it should.
I think about my own seventy-four years differently now. Each year felt significant when I was living it. First day of school. First kiss. First job. Marriage. My child. Loss. Joy. The usual human business of being alive and conscious and worried about it.
But in deep time, my entire life... everyone's entire life... is less than a breath. All of human civilization, from the first cities to space stations, is a thin layer in the geological record. Future paleontologists (or robots?) might find a layer rich in plastic and concrete and plutonium and wonder what we were thinking.
Does this make life meaningless? Some people think so. I don't. The godwit's migration doesn't mean less because it took millions of years to evolve. It means more. Every improbable thing that had to happen led to this: a bird that can cross an ocean on willpower and precious fat.
My seventy-four years matter because I'm here to experience them. To watch godwits. To wonder about time. To write these words that you're reading now, which is a small miracle when you think about it.
The godwits don't know about deep time. They don't need to. They're too busy being perfect flying machines, doing what millions of years of evolution designed them to do. They don't wonder about meaning or purpose. They just fly.
There's ageless wisdom in that.
And meaning: standing on a beach, nearly seventy-four years old, watching a bird that can amazingly accomplish something impossible, and feeling grateful to be alive in this particular moment of Earth's long, strange story.
The godwits will be here next year, if we let them. And I plan to be around thinking about deep time and my time and the brief, strange overlap between them.
It's enough to make you believe in mystery. Beauty, maybe. Persistence. The awesomeness of life on our planet… billions of years old and filled with endless wonders.
Endless Wonders by George Sranko
