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How does a small bird fly around the entire planet every year?

Think about it: a small bird weighing only 100 grams — like a chocolate bar. Wingspan a little over 70 centimeters. At first glance, it looks like an ordinary seabird. But in fact, it is the greatest traveler in the entire animal world!

Every year, the tern flies from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back. That’s two trips across the entire Earth — from the North Pole to the South Pole. That’s about 70,000 kilometers in a year! If you were to walk that far, it would take you 20 years to do it nonstop. And the tern flies like this all its life — and it lives up to 30 years. In its lifetime, one bird flies a distance equal to three trips to the Moon and back!

But why doesn't it sit still? The secret is simple and ingenious: the tern flies after the summer. When it's June in the Arctic and the sun hasn't set, it hatches its chicks there. And when winter sets in the northern hemisphere, it flies south, where the Antarctic summer just begins. This bird sees more sunlight than any other creature on the planet.

How not to get lost on the road? The tern navigates by the stars, the sun, and even the Earth's magnetic field - its head has something like a built-in compass.

People invented airplanes, GPS, satellites — to travel the world. And the tern did it long before us, with only a pair of wings and feelings in its tiny heart. A small body — a big dream of flying.