Wandering Albatross Facts

The wandering albatross has a body about the size of a large swan — 3.5 to 4.4 feet long and 13 to 26 pounds — but it's the wings that astonish: a big adult male spans up to 11.5 feet tip to tip. Those long, narrow wings are engineered for "dynamic soaring," and to hold them out against gale-force winds without tiring, the albatross has a tendon that locks the shoulder joint once the wings are fully extended, so it can keep them rigid using no muscle. The large, pale-pink bill hooks sharply at the tip to snatch slippery prey from the surface, and atop it sit the distinctive tube nostrils of its order: they house an unusually strong sense of smell to find food miles off, and vent a salt gland above the eyes that filters the seawater the bird drinks. It belongs to the albatross family Diomedeidae in the "tubenose" order Procellariiformes, and its name exulans means "the wanderer."

The wandering albatross is a true creature of the open ocean, found almost only in the Southern Hemisphere, riding the continuous wind belts across the Southern Ocean and the southern Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. For most of its life its habitat is simply the open sky and the surface of the cold, turbulent sea; it returns to land only to breed, choosing remote, predator-free subantarctic islands like South Georgia, the Crozets, Kerguelen, and Macquarie, whose sparse, windswept grassy slopes let it make its clumsy running takeoffs.

Wandering albatrosses are pelagic carnivores heavily reliant on cephalopods — mainly squid and cuttlefish — with some schooling fish, krill, and crustaceans. They are surface feeders, landing on the water and seizing prey with the hooked bill rather than diving deep, and because many deep-sea squid rise toward the surface at night, the albatross is well adapted to nocturnal foraging, tracking fish-oil scents by smell and spotting the glow of bioluminescent squid in the dark. They also scavenge opportunistically, trailing fishing vessels for discarded offal and feeding on floating whale or toothfish carcasses, and they convert this high-fat food into a rich, foul-smelling stomach oil they can store for long flights or regurgitate to the chick.

Though they spend years alone over the ocean, wandering albatrosses have a complex social life at the breeding colonies: strictly monogamous, they typically mate for life in bonds lasting decades. Finding a mate is a long process — young birds return to the colony and spend several years watching and practicing intricate courtship dances of head-bowing, mutual preening, bill-snapping, and sky-pointing with braying calls, until a pair perfects its own unique dance. In the air, everything is dynamic soaring: the bird repeatedly turns into the wind to gain height, then banks and glides downwind at speed, exploiting the wind shear above the waves to sustain 40 to 65 mph for hours and cover over 120,000 kilometers a year — roughly three trips around the world.

The wandering albatross has one of the longest breeding cycles of any bird, and because raising a single chick takes so much time and energy, a pair breeds only every two years. In November the pair reunites and builds a large bowl-shaped nest of mud, moss, and grass, and the female lays a single big egg in December. Both parents share the grueling incubation in shifts of weeks while the other flies thousands of miles to feed, and the egg hatches after about 78 to 85 days. Fed on rich stomach oil, the chick grows to outweigh its own parents, sitting alone on the nest through the brutal subantarctic winter while they forage, and takes an agonizing 9 to 10 months to fledge. Once it finally flies it won't touch land again for 5 to 10 years, and in the wild these birds commonly reach 50 to 60 years.

The wandering albatross is Vulnerable with a rapidly decreasing trend. The primary driver is commercial fisheries bycatch, specifically pelagic longlining for tuna and toothfish: the vessels trail lines miles long baited with thousands of squid, and hungry albatrosses dive for the bait, swallow the hooks, and are dragged under and drowned. Mitigation measures exist — setting lines at night, using weighted hooks — but aren't universally enforced. The birds also increasingly face marine plastic pollution, mistaking floating debris for prey and feeding it to their chicks, causing fatal blockages.

• IUCN Red List of Threatened Species: Wandering Albatross
• Agreement on the Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels (ACAP)
• British Antarctic Survey: Albatrosses
• Cornell Lab of Ornithology: Wandering Albatross