Buller's Albatross

Fascinating facts about the Buller's Albatross

• There are 20 pairs on Rosemary Rock, showing that a tiny island can hold a disproportionate slice of the Buller's albatross population.
• When incubation begins in late January, each parent takes turns for about 10 days before swapping, keeping the egg warm for a full 60-day stint. Such long, shared shifts highlight how teamwork is essential for raising chicks in the harsh Southern Ocean.
• Juvenile albatrosses and non-breeding adults wander across the South Pacific, but many still feed each year in the nutrient-rich Humboldt Current off Chile and Peru. Their ability to travel thousands of kilometres for food links distant ecosystems together.
• The Snares Islands colony now boasts an adult survival rate of 95.5% and a brooding success of 70.8%, a jump from earlier decades. These numbers prove that protected breeding grounds can quickly boost population health.
• With an occurrence range of 16,100,000 km² yet a breeding range of only 4 km², the species packs a massive foraging world into a minuscule nesting footprint. This contrast underscores how vulnerable breeding sites are, even when the birds roam vast oceans.

At a glance

About the Buller's Albatross

Buller's albatross (Thalassarche bulleri) is a sleek, medium-sized mollymawk that averages 79 cm (31 in) in length. Its plumage is a striking contrast of silver-grey forehead, dark grey back, upperwing and tail, and crisp white rump and underparts. A bold black eye patch is bisected by a white crescent, while the underwing is stark white with a black tip and a sharply defined dark band along the leading edge. The large bill is black with yellow on the upper mandible and tip, turning a browner hue in juveniles. Endemic to New Zealand, these birds nest in colonies on cliffs, steep coastal terraces, grassy meadows, and tussock-covered hills of the Snares Islands, Solander Island, the Chatham Islands (Big and Little Sister and Forty-fours Island), and Three Kings Islands (Rosemary Rock). Breeding begins in December, with eggs laid in late January and an incubation period of about 60 days shared equally by both parents. After hatching, chicks fledge after roughly 170 days, and the pair returns each year to the same site. Foraging takes the albatross far beyond its breeding islands, ranging between 40° S and 50° S from Tasmania to the Chatham Rise, and even reaching the Humboldt Current off Chile and Peru. Its diet is a varied oceanic buffet of squid, fish, tunicates, octopus, and crustacea. A surprising adaptation is its production of a wax-rich stomach oil stored in the proventriculus, which serves both as a potent defense against predators and as a high-energy food reserve for chicks and adults during their prodigious flights across the Southern Ocean.

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