The Longest Commute

Each year the Arctic tern undertakes a journey that beggars belief, chasing perpetual summer from pole to pole and clocking up a lifetime mileage that would ferry it to the moon and back several times over. This featherweight voyager weathers howling gales and open ocean with nothing to sustain it but instinct and the odd plunge for fish. That so frail a creature should navigate half a planet without chart or compass, guided by cues we are only beginning to fathom, is a rebuke to any notion that grandeur requires great size.