Albatrosses

After our late-night shenanigans at the rugby we ended up parking the van in a random carpark on the Otago Peninsula overnight. So imagine our delight to wake up to a beautiful view of the estuary. I don’t need to say much about today apart from it’s been AWESOME. We saw Albatrosses, fur seals and a baby penguin!

Because they are so awesome, here are some photos and some facts about Royal Albatrosses-

Bull Kelp from the cliffs-it was forming such incredible patterns!

A baby Albatross-the first day alone from its Mum!

View looking back over the peninsula

Fur seals

A baby penguin! (Look closely!)

Albatrosses! 

·         The live a looooong time and the oldest on record is still alive and still breeding at 64

·        They have a 3m wingspan

·         Once they’ve hatched, they rapidly grow so big that they outweigh their parents. Some can reach 13kg, and in contrast the adult parents may drop to 5kg by the time the fledglings leave their nest! That’s a big baby!

·         Once the fledgling takes off for the first time, their feet don’t touch the ground for the next 5 years. In this time they remain at sea feeding and sleeping and have been recorded to have flown from NZ to Argentina, a whopping 9,000 miles in 9 months!!

·         They return to the same nesting place where they themselves hatched. The male chooses the spot, but if the female disapproves she will move it! Once mature, each breeding pair will lay an egg every other year.

·         Adult breeding pairs recognise their own nesting site and their own mate, but do not recognise their offspring. This is particularly useful to breeders who occasionally swap offspring if one breeding pair is struggling to look after theirs. It also means that parents often mate with their siblings or offspring, but this doesn’t seem to have a detrimental effect on their gene-pool or on any offspring produced as a result.

·         They have 4 joints in their wings

·         Newly hatched nestlings aren’t waterproof

·         They have the second-largest eggs of any bird after the ostrich (followed closely by the kiwi)

·         And if you’ve made it this far without falling asleep, my favourite fact is that they drink only salt water, and we all know that too much salt isn’t good for you. So…to deal with this they have salt glands at the top of their beak to filter out the salt which then drips of the end of their beak continuously in a highly-concentrated salt solution. Because of this, it has long been said by locals that Albatrosses are seen to be crying as they do not like being on land (in actual fact they ‘cry’ at sea too, but we won’t tell the locals that).

And that’s all we can remember for now.