USA. Is rare Albatross now colonizing Hawai'i?

Maybe ten rare Short-tailed Albatrosses showing up at several Hawaiian Islands doesn’t count as a new population, but those sightings are still causing a buzz in the conservation and birding worlds.

“This is a bird that was once thought extinct and even now inhabits only a very small geographic area in Japan. The fact that it is now showing up in Hawai‘i in double-digit numbers around breeding season is huge news and potentially a major development in the efforts to protect this species from extinction,” said Dr. George Wallace, Vice President for Oceans and Islands at American Bird Conservancy, the nation’s leading bird conservation organization. Wallace said that three birds have been seen on Kure Atoll, five on Midway Island, one on Laysan Island, and one on Tern Island.

The Short-tailed Albatross was once the most abundant of the North Pacific albatross species, numbering more than a million birds. It was decimated by feather hunting at the turn of the 20th Century, and by the late 1940s was thought to be extinct. In the early 1950s, ten pairs were discovered breeding on the island of Torishima, Japan. The population has now reached 3,000 individuals, with most still on Torishima, but conservationists fear an eruption of the active volcano there could spell disaster. For the last five years, the Short-tailed Albatross Recovery Team, an international group of collaborators, has been working on establishing a new colony on Mukojima Island, also in Japan, which is safe from volcanic activity.

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