Albatrosses Can Fly for Years Without Landing.

There is a moment in the life of a wandering albatross that I find genuinely difficult to comprehend. A juvenile bird leaves its nest on South Georgia Island in the South Atlantic, spreads wings that span up to 3.5 meters, and flies out over the Southern Ocean. It will not touch land again for up to six years.

During those six years, it will circumnavigate the globe multiple times. It will sleep in short bursts while flying. It will cover distances that make the migrations of other birds look like afternoon walks. And it will do almost all of this without flapping its wings.

Diomedea exulans, the wandering albatross, has mastered a flight technique called dynamic soaring that allows it to extract energy from the wind gradient above the ocean surface and travel almost indefinitely at minimal metabolic cost. Understanding how it works requires a brief detour into fluid dynamics, but the payoff is worth it.

Dynamic Soaring

Wind speed increases with altitude above the ocean surface. Close to the water, friction slows the wind. Higher up, it moves faster. An albatross exploits this gradient by flying a specific figure-eight pattern relative to the wind. It descends toward the surface with the wind, gaining speed. It then turns into the wind and climbs, using the momentum gained in the descent to rise against the faster-moving air at altitude, which provides lift. At the top of the climb, it turns downwind again and descends, repeating the cycle.

The result is a bird that can travel at speeds of 70 to 80 kilometers per hour for hours at a time with a heart rate barely above resting. Researcher Henri Weimerskirch at the French National Centre for Scientific Research has attached heart rate monitors and GPS loggers to wandering albatrosses and found that their energy expenditure during flight is so low that the cost of flying is comparable to the cost of sitting still. The ocean wind is doing the work.

This technique only works over open ocean where wind is consistent and there are no obstacles. It is why albatrosses are almost never seen over land and why they are so strongly associated with the Southern Ocean, where the roaring forties and furious fifties provide the reliable strong winds the technique requires.

The Pair Bond

Wandering albatrosses mate for life, and the pair bond is maintained across years of separation. A breeding pair meets on South Georgia every two years, since raising a single chick takes a full year and the adults need a year of ocean wandering to recover the body condition required for the next breeding attempt. When a pair reunites after a year apart, they perform an elaborate greeting display involving bill clapping, wing spreading, and synchronized calling that can last for several minutes.

Researcher Henri Weimerskirch and colleague Pierre Jouventin documented pair bond fidelity in wandering albatrosses across decades of monitoring at Possession Island in the Crozet archipelago, finding that pairs that stay together have significantly higher breeding success than those that divorce and find new partners. Divorce in albatrosses is rare and almost always follows breeding failure, suggesting that pairs assess each other’s quality through reproductive performance rather than maintaining bonds for their own sake.

The chick that results from a successful breeding attempt is one of the slowest-developing birds on Earth. It hatches after an 11-week incubation period, is fed by both parents for approximately 9 months, and fledges at a weight heavier than its parents. The parents lose significant body mass during the chick-rearing period, which is why they need a full year of ocean foraging before they can breed again.

Longlines and the Bycatch Crisis

Wandering albatrosses are listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, with populations declining across most of their breeding sites. The primary cause is bycatch in longline fishing operations. Longline vessels set lines with thousands of baited hooks that extend for tens of kilometers behind the vessel. Albatrosses, attracted by the bait, dive for the hooks as the line is being set and are dragged underwater and drowned.

Researcher John Croxall at the British Antarctic Survey, who has studied albatross population dynamics for decades, has estimated that longline fishing kills tens of thousands of albatrosses annually across all species. Simple mitigation measures, including setting lines at night when albatrosses are less active, weighting lines so they sink quickly below diving depth, and using bird-scaring streamers to keep birds away from the line during setting, can reduce bycatch by over 90%. The measures are inexpensive. Their adoption by fishing fleets has been inconsistent.

Of the 22 recognized albatross species, 15 are threatened with extinction. The wandering albatross, which can live for over 60 years and has been tracked covering over 120,000 kilometers in a single year, is being killed by hooks baited for fish it was not meant to catch. A bird that can fly for years without landing is being stopped by a piece of steel on a line.