Scientists Confirm Seabirds Get Jet Lag, Which Explains Why They Fly Home Looking Like a Man Who Just Landed From Lagos via Dubai

Science has finally proved what every traveler suspected while staring at a hotel minibar at 4 a.m.: jet lag is not a human weakness. It is a law of nature. Even the birds have it, and they don't even have to take their shoes off at security.

A study published in the journal Science found that Manx shearwaters, seabirds that fly home from the Atlantic at absurd speed, get their body clocks scrambled on the way and drift off course. The birds have no boarding pass, no middle seat and no toddler kicking the back of their wing. They still landed disoriented. Somewhere, every airline is printing that on a brochure.

The shearwater, for the record, is not a seagull, no matter how it looks. "They're actually very closely related to an albatross," said Patrick Lewin, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Oxford. That is the bird version of "I'm not a cab driver, I'm in logistics."

Their home life is admirably modern. They mate for life and lay exactly one egg, then split the shifts. "One partner will sit on the egg nonstop while the other one goes out to sea," Lewin said. That is a marriage, a daycare and a fishing business, with only one employee clocked in at any time.

The partner at sea spends up to two weeks hunting fish and squid across the North Atlantic, which is the longest "I'm just popping out for bread" in the animal kingdom. Then, with a full belly and a guilty conscience, it heads home. "They absolutely bomb it back to their colony," Lewin said. Nobody has ever described a husband returning from the market more accurately.

Here is where the trouble starts. The birds steer by the sun, and as Lewin put it, "To use the sun as a compass you have to know what time of day it is." The shearwater's body says breakfast. The sky says lunch. The bird, like any traveler, picks a direction based on confidence and not information.

To catch it, Oxford researchers spent 20 years strapping tiny GPS trackers onto 1,045 birds and studying 1,837 trips home. That is two decades of grant money spent proving a bird was slightly lost, which is the most British research project since someone timed a queue. Biologist Tim Guilford said testing the idea in the wild "has seemed impossible until now." Now it is merely expensive.

The verdict: the birds veered up to about 15 degrees off course. After correcting, the detour added only about 3 miles to a 600-mile journey. In human terms, that is missing your exit once, blaming the GPS, and still getting home before the rice is done.

Even more embarrassing, the birds kept the error while flying along coastlines they presumably knew. They could see home. They trusted the sun anyway. That is a man driving past his own house because the map app has not finished talking.

The real danger is for rookies. First-time foragers could be thrown hundreds of miles off course, which means somewhere a teenage shearwater left to buy squid and is now explaining itself to a Portuguese fisherman.

So the lesson is simple. If a bird with a built-in compass, a GPS tracker and 20 years of Oxford supervision can't beat jet lag, you are not going to beat it with melatonin and a positive attitude. The egg, meanwhile, is still waiting. Its other parent is fine. Just about 15 degrees from fine.