If you have been following my blog, you know from an earlier post that I've already seen a a Short-tailed Albatross, but yesterday was huge! Let me explain.
The Short-tailed Albatross, Phoebastria albatrus, is likely the rarest of the albatrosses. With a wing span of over 8 feet, it is significantly larger than the other two Albatross found on Midway. Once believed to have over 7 million individuals soaring through the pacific and nesting on a variety of different islands, human impacts such as longline fishing, the feather trade, the consumption of their eggs, and plastics have caused there numbers to plummet to around 22 hundred. Currently they are only believed to breed on a single island off of Japan.
The big news:
(Let me apologize for the photo quality. Because these birds are so rare and, over time, have become quite skittish of humans, we are asked to give them 150 ft at all times... and I didn't think to bring my camera with a better zoom.)
The two big birds in the center are the Short-tailed Albatrosses. To give you an idea of size, the small white and black birds around them are the Laysan Albatross that litter my front door. If you look more carefully, the darker female is sitting on a nest. Short-tailed Albatross are not sexually dimorphic, she is darker, not because she is female, but because she hasn't developed breeding plumage yet. However, according to the assistant refuge manager here she should still be sexually mature and therefore able to breed.
Another interesting thing about this photo is that the Short-tailed Albatross in the upper right hand corner is a fake. It is one of about 2 dozen decoys that have been put up in order to encourage Short-tails to land on Eastern. Supposedly in previous years the adult male has been seen courting his favorite decoy.
There is no egg in the nest yet, and we are months away from a fledgling, but this is huge.
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