Wandering Albatross — facts, diet, habitat & conservation

The wandering albatross is the bird that best fits the word “oceanic.” It has the longest wings of any living bird, it spends years at a time at sea without touching land, and it moves across the Southern Ocean by borrowing energy from the wind — flying thousands of kilometres for the cost, in effort, of a short walk.

Overview

Wandering albatrosses range across the entire Southern Ocean, the belt of wild, windswept water that circles Antarctica. They come ashore only to breed, on a scattering of remote sub-Antarctic islands, and a young albatross that leaves its nest may not return to land for five to ten years, remaining airborne over the sea almost continuously in between.

Built for the wind

Everything about the wandering albatross is shaped by soaring flight:

The wings span up to 3.5 m and are long and narrow, the shape of a high-performance glider, ideal for extracting lift from moving air but hopeless for hovering or flying in calm conditions.
A shoulder-lock tendon holds each wing fully extended without any muscular effort, so the bird can glide for hours in a fixed posture.
The flight technique is dynamic soaring — a repeating swoop that climbs into the fast wind higher above the waves, turns to accelerate, and dives back toward the sea, harvesting energy from the difference in wind speed at each altitude. In a good blow, an albatross can keep this up indefinitely and cover 1,000 km in a day.

The trade-off is a dependence on wind. Becalmed, a wandering albatross is stuck, sitting on the water until the weather changes.

Feeding

Wandering albatrosses feed at the sea surface, mostly on squid and fish, plus carrion and fishery discards. They locate food by smell as well as sight, homing in on the scent of prey and of feeding activity from many kilometres downwind, and they feed heavily at night when squid rise toward the surface. During breeding, a parent may fly 10,000 km on a single trip to gather a meal for its chick.

The slowest breeders

Wandering albatrosses have one of the slowest reproductive rates of any bird. Pairs mate for life, reunite each breeding season with an elaborate dance of bill-clapping, sky-pointing, and wing-spreading, and lay a single egg. Incubation takes about 11 weeks, and the chick then sits on the nest through the sub-Antarctic winter, fed at long intervals, taking nine to ten months to fledge. Because raising a chick takes more than a year, a successful pair breeds only every other year, and young birds do not start breeding until they are around ten.

Threats and conservation

The wandering albatross is listed as Vulnerable, and its numbers are falling:

Longline fishing bycatch. Albatrosses are hooked on baited longlines as they are deployed and drown. Simple mitigation — setting lines at night, weighting them to sink fast, and streaming bird-scaring lines — dramatically reduces the deaths where it is used and enforced.
Invasive mice on some breeding islands, which have learned to attack and kill albatross chicks on the nest.
Plastic ingestion, as birds pick floating debris off the surface and feed it to chicks.
Climate shifts in Southern Ocean winds and prey distribution that change how far and how successfully the birds can forage.

Wandering Albatross: common questions

How big is a wandering albatross's wingspan?

Up to 3.5 metres from tip to tip, the largest of any bird alive. The wings are also extremely narrow, giving a high "aspect ratio" like a glider, which is what makes the bird so efficient in the air and so awkward on land or in still conditions.

How can an albatross fly for days without flapping?

It uses dynamic soaring. The wind over the ocean is slower near the surface, where it is slowed by friction, and faster higher up. An albatross repeatedly climbs into the faster wind, turns downwind to gain speed, then dives back toward the surface, extracting energy from the wind gradient with each cycle. A tendon lock holds the wing fully open with no muscle effort, so soaring costs it barely more energy than sitting still.

How far do wandering albatrosses travel?

Enormous distances. A single foraging trip during breeding can be 10,000 km or more, lasting several weeks, and outside the breeding season some birds circle the entire Southern Ocean, covering well over 100,000 km in a year.

Why are wandering albatrosses endangered?

The main threat is longline fishing. Albatrosses dive on the baited hooks as they are set, get hooked, and are dragged under and drowned — a cause of death for tens of thousands of albatrosses of various species each year. Because a pair raises at most one chick every two years, and birds do not breed until about ten years old, the population cannot absorb those losses.