A significant athletic achievement happened over the weekend. You may be thinking of the London Marathon in which Kenya's Sabastian Sawe ran the 26.2 miles in under two hours—a first (at least in an officially sanctioned race).

Yes, that is amazing. But that’s not what we were referring to.

What we mean is the unheralded feat of a bird apparently known to the Audubon scientists who tagged it in the agricultural fields south of Cali, Colombia as Cholao 2.

We weren’t sure what cholao means, either, but an internet search claims that it’s a Colombian dessert with shaved ice, fresh fruit, condensed milk, and various other tasty items.

Cholao 2 is a lesser yellowlegs, one of five carrying a satellite tag that provides real-time locations every few minutes so that it’s possible to learn more about the hour-by-hour movements of each bird. When they are on the wintering grounds in the Cauca Valley of Colombia, those movements can tell what places the bird spends its time feeding and sleeping. When migration begins, the satellite tags let you follow along in detail as the bird makes the long journey north to the wetlands of the Boreal Forest biome of Canada or Alaska. That’s where all lesser yellowlegs nest each summer.

We were first alerted to the beginning of Cholao 2’s dramatic exploits late on Friday afternoon. The bird was flying north from Panama across the open ocean on a bearing toward Jamaica. Why would this bird fly out over the wide blue waters of the Caribbean Sea rather than remain over land, where it could safely drop for a stop in case of emergency?

One possibility is that it wanted to take the shortest route back north. A straighter route across the ocean could shave off as much as 600 miles from a more curved route that stayed above the Central American and Mexican land mass.

Whatever the reason, there is something elemental, raw, and downright scary (from a human perspective) knowing this bird must keep beating its wings ceaselessly until it could no longer see land in any direction. At some point night came and it was still out there, now high over the ocean, its wings never stopping.

A little before noon on Saturday, we checked in again. Cholao 2 was nearing the 120-mile strait between the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico and the western tip of Cuba. Depending on how high it was flying, maybe it could even see the coast or mainland mountains. Surely it would take a break, we thought.

But no. Cholao 2 just kept flying north, farther and farther from the closest land. It saw a second sunset from high over the sea. By around 10 AM on Sunday morning, this little shorebird with long-yellow legs had been flying non-stop for 48 hours and was still smack  in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico.

By then we were feeling tense, emotionally invested in seeing Cholao 2 make it to the migration marathon finish line. Go, go, go. Don’t stop, Cholao, you can do it!

Without fanfare, at half past noon, Cholao 2 glided in over the coast of Louisiana, perhaps over the little community of Pecan Island in Vermilion Parish.

Flying nonstop for 1,600 miles seems to us pretty extraordinary. It is extraordinary! But even more extraordinary is that every other lesser yellowlegs, and billions of other birds around the world, have to make journeys just as mind-blowing, every season, in order to continue their lives on Planet Earth.

Doesn’t it make you want to do what you can for them?

Another interesting piece of good news is that Cholao 2 landed in the area of a large 71,000-acre parcel of conservation land called the White Lake Wetland Conservation Area. There’s a sad part, though: this was apparently the location where the last surviving non-migratory whooping crane persisted until it was captured and brought to join the last few migratory whooping cranes that wintered along the Texas Coast at Aransas. That bird died, but the migratory whooping cranes continue their ancestral migrations north to the Boreal Forest nesting grounds to Wood Buffalo National Park on the border between Alberta and the Northwest Territories.

Thanks to extensive conservation and captive breeding work, whooping cranes have come back. Some of those captive-bred birds have now been brought back to White Lake Wetland Conservation Area to start a new non-migratory population. We can’t help but imagine the wondrous Cholao 2, darting about on its spindly yellow legs under the five-foot high all-white whooping crane, one bird having just arrived from a winter in South America, the other steadfastly surveying the wetlands it never leaves. It’s a scene that has taken place for millennia. We hope it will still be happening for generations to come.

Jeffrey V. Wells, Ph.D., is a Fellow of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Vice President of Boreal Conservation for National Audubon. Dr. Wells is one of the nation's leading bird experts and conservation biologists. He is a coauthor of the seminal “Birds of Maine” book and author of the “Birder’s Conservation Handbook.” His grandfather, the late John Chase, was a columnist for the Boothbay Register for many years. Allison Childs Wells, formerly of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is a senior director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine, a nonprofit membership organization working statewide to protect the nature of Maine. Both are widely published natural history writers and are the authors of the popular books, “Maine’s Favorite Birds” (Down East Books) and “Birds of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao: A Site and Field Guide,” (Cornell University Press).