Distance = Rate x Time

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#25 - Distance = Rate x Time

Ever since I’ve started living in Tacoma during the fall of 2021, I’ve seen many traveling birds. Big and small, flying through the sky above. I couldn’t help but wonder how long they spend on their travels. My younger brother very much likes to learn and observe birds, but specifically geese. He would be fascinated when seeing geese at the park and would always beg my parents to let him feed them. I wanted to learn more about these animals that my brother was always intrigued by, so I decided to dedicate my research to a species of geese, the snow geese.

One of the key factors of snow geese is that they often migrate through North America and across open waters in the Pacific, depending on the weather and temperature of the regions. To learn more about these geese, I wanted to see how long they could fly in order to reach their destination. The Distance, Rate, and Time formula, d = r x t, is a common formula that is used in many daily life situations. Here, d stands for the distance traveled, r for the constant rate, and t for the time.

Specifically, I will be calculating how long it would take snow geese to travel from Wrangel Island, Russia to Skagit Valley in Washington state. The distance from Wrangel Island to Skagit Valley is roughly 3000 miles and snow geese typically fly at a rate of 50 mph, so let us use that to substitute into our variables.

d = 3000, r = 50, t = ?

To find the t, the time, we can substitute these numbers into our formula. We divide by the rate and are left with:

These results show that if the snow geese can keep up with a constant rate of 50 mph, they will fly for 60 hours. This calculation does not account for breaks and foraging, but it helps us understand the general idea of how long geese migrate. In order to account for breaks, we need to add more data to the equation.

In order to include breaks, the data needed involves how long the birds fly each day. According to the American Bird Conservancy¹, the average distance traveled per day by a migratory bird is anywhere from 15 to 600 miles. More data on their site shows that at max birds are flying nearly 11 hours of the day, at 55 miles an hour, to come out to the full 600 miles. If we substitute in 50 miles an hour: 50 multiplied by the ~10.909, it comes out to be 545.45 miles flown per day, with rests accounted for.

We can now use this new information to account for the resting of the geese on their migration, which involves taking the total amount of miles (~3000), and dividing it by the rate, which is 545.45 miles in a day. This all comes out to be roughly 5.5 total days of travel, which then in turn makes around 132 total hours of travel. This amount tells us how the geese will travel now with rests accounted for, instead of flying nonstop.

References

¹Five Fantastic Bird Migration Facts - American Bird Conservancy. (2019, May 10). American Bird Conservancy; https://www.facebook.com/AmericanBirdConserve/. https://abcbirds.org/blog/five-fantastic-bird-migration-facts/#:~:text=These%20range%20from%2015%20to,%E2%80%94%20or%20more%20%E2%80%94%20each%20day.

Greater White-fronted Goose - Anser albifrons - Birds of the World. (n.d.). Birds of the World - Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Retrieved February 22, 2022, from https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow/species/gwfgoo/cur/introduction?__hstc=75100365.9285399b5e030093a250cba5507e534a.1644876253218.1644876253218.1644876253218.1&__hssc=75100365.3.1644876253219&__hsfp=421127794&_gl=1*p04ok1*_ga*ODc0NTk5OTUxLjE2NDQ4NzYyNDk.*_ga_QR4NVXZ8BM*MTY0NDg3NjI1Mi4xLjEuMTY0NDg3Njk0NS40Nw..

Snow Goose. (n.d.). BirdWeb. Retrieved February 22, 2022, from https://www.birdweb.org/birdweb/bird/snow_goose#:~:text=Snow%20Geese%20are%20typically%20seen,October%20to%20mid%2DNovember

Pacific Ocean. (n.d.). Encyclopædia Britannica; Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved April 5, 2022, from https://www.britannica.com/place/Pacific-Ocean/The-trade-winds.