Tag Archives: Wisdom the Laysan Albatross

Albatross known as Wisdom returns again to Midway Atoll 

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Readers with good memory will recall that I’ve written numerous times over the years about a special bird by the name of Wisdom.

She’s making headlines again!

Wisdom, the world’s oldest known wild bird, recently returned to Midway Atoll. She was first spotted back in this familiar territory on Nov. 24, 2022, in fact.

Wisdom is considered world’s oldest wild bird

The beloved Laysan albatross is at least 71 years old now. Biologists first identified and banded Wisdom in 1956 after she laid an egg, and these large seabirds aren’t known to breed before age five.

Photo by Bob Peyton/USFWS • Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge and Battle of Midway National Memorialwithin Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument is a special place for over three million seabirds – they return to Midway Atoll each year to rest, mate, lay eggs and raise their chicks.

Researchers have estimated that Wisdom has produced 50 to 60 eggs and as many as 30 chicks that fledged, according to Jonathan Plissner, supervisory wildlife biologist at Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge.

The ageless Wisdom, with her well-known band number of Z333, was first spotted this nesting season on Thanksgiving Day. Her long-time mate, Akeakamai, has yet to be seen and was absent last nesting season, too. Male albatrosses typically return to the breeding site before their mates, wrote Plissner in an email.

For decades, Wisdom and Akeakamai, like most pairs of these albatrosses, returned every year to the same nest site to lay one egg.  

They are among the millions of albatross that return to Midway Atoll on the far northern end of the Hawaiian archipelago to nest and raise their young. 

For some unknown reason, Wisdom only made a brief appearance late last year. In a release dated Dec. 9, 2022, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service noted that Wisdom had not been seen in the past week and most mōlī have already laid their egg for the season, but biologists will continue to monitor the area in case the world’s oldest known bird returns.

Among albatross, the Laysan albatross is a small species. This bird has a body length of 23 inches and a wingspan of about 80 inches, or six-and-a-half feet. The larger species of albatross have wingspans of 12 feet. 

Worldwide, there are about 20 or so species of albatross. Most albatrosses range in the Southern Hemisphere from Antarctica to Australia, South Africa, and South America.

In literature, the poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge uses an albatross to explore the concepts of innocence and creation.

French poet Charles Baudelaire also featured this bird in his poem titled “L’Albatros.” 

Albatrosses haven’t coexisted easily with humans. Fifteen of the world’s albatross species face possible extinction. Two species, Tristan albatross and waved albatross are considered critically endangered. 

Albatrosses are long-lived birds, with some gaining a ripe old age of 50 years or more. Only parrots rival them for longevity, with some parrots and macaws documents as living more than a century. 

Wisdom hatched her most recent chick in February 2021, making her at least 70 years old at the time. She is the oldest confirmed wild bird and the oldest banded bird in the world.

I hope that Wisdom’s simply off gliding over the world’s vast oceans and will make more future appearances. Since learning of her story, I’ve been continually amazed by her indomitable spirit. Long may she fly.

Speaking of long lives among out feathered friends, there are some impressive age milestones that have been reached by other birds. 

Longevity Records

According to the American Bird Conservancy website, here are some of the world’s longest-lived wild birds:

• common raven — 69 years

• American flamingo — 49 years

• bald eagle — 38 years

• sandhill crane — 37 years

• Canada goose — 33 years

• Atlantic puffin — 33 years

• red-tailed hawk — 30 years

• mourning dove — 30

• great horned owl — 28 years

• mallard — 27 years

• blue jay — 26 years

• great blue heron — 24 years

• laughing gull — 22 years

• piping plover — 17 years

While it’s usually the larger birds that live longer, some songbirds, just like people, can live astonishingly long lives. The hummingbirds, which are truly tiny, can produce individuals that reach a relatively old age. For instance, a broad-billed hummingbird has been documented reaching the age of 14 years.

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Email me at ahoodedwarbler@aol.com to share sightings or ask questions. 

Birds made news headlines in 2019

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Photo by Public Domain Photos/Pixabay.com • California condors have gradually returned to parts of their range beyond California. A family of condors now resides in Zion National Park, marking a return of these birds to Utah.

 

Birds made headlines in 2019. Some species, having been presumed extinct, were rediscovered — some in the mostly unlikely of places. One of the major bird-related stories of the year involved a stark warning about a sharp decline in overall bird numbers. Below, in no particular order, are some of last year’s top stories about our fine feathered friends.

69 years old and a mother again

The Laysan albatross known as Wisdom and her mate, Akeakamai, became parents again in 2010. Wisdom is at least 69 years old and ranks as the world’s oldest known banded wild bird. Her mate’s name, by the way, translates as “lover of wisdom.” The chick hatched in February at Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge and Battle of Midway National Memorial. Wisdom has raised more than 30 chicks in her lifetime. While Laysan albatrosses are not considered endangered, some of their kin are threatened with extinction.

Photo by J. Klavitter/USFWS • Wisdom, one of Midway Atoll’s oldest residents, became a mother again in 2019. The female Laysan albatross is approaching her 70th birthday.

While walking to church

The year started with some good birding news when a bird thought extinct was rediscovered in a suburb of Medellín, Colombia, on Jan. 7, 2019. Rodolfo Correa Peña was headed to a church service when he spotted an odd bird in a garden. The bird turned out to be an Antioquia brushfinch, a bird known previously only from museum specimens. Peña, an engineering student with an interest in birding, knew the local brushfinches and recognized that the bird was different. He secured photos of the bird and stunned the scientific community with the rediscovery of a bird presumed extinct.

Photo by U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service • Endangered California condors receives some good news in 2019..

Condors soaring high

California condors continue to delight with their success stories, even extending their range beyond California. Estimates indicate that 300 condors exist in the wild with about 200 more birds in captivity for use with breeding programs. Evidence that the work to preserve the species is working was provided this year in Utah’s Zion National Park, which became home to a condor named “1K” because it is the 1,000th chick hatched as part of an extensive condor restoration program. The chick hatched in May and took a rather clumsy first flight in September. The chick represents the first condor born within Zion National Park in more than a century. In 1987, when the condor population totaled only 27 known condors, wildlife officials captured the surviving wild birds and made them part of an existing captive breeding program. In 1992, the condor recovery program started to release the birds back into the wild. There are now more condors flying free in the wild than are maintained in captivity.

Photo by Bryan Stevens
A large flock of Great Egrets flies over the Watauga River in Elizabethton. There is mounting evidence that many bird populations are on the decline.

Fewer birds?

Bird enthusiasts were shaken by the publication in September of an article warning that the number of birds in the United States and Canada has fallen by 29 percent since 1970. The analysis, published in the journal “Science,” is an extensive attempt to determine what is happening to avian populations. The results shocked — there are 2.9 billion fewer birds taking wing now than there were 50 years ago.

A painting of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker by Mark Catesby, an English naturalist.

Hope

Yet, in words penned by poet Emily Dickinson, “Hope is the thing with feathers.” Birds are among the most resilient lifeforms on the planet. If humans can get out of the way and quit making life more difficult for the feathered inhabitants of the planet, birds are more than capable of rebounding. The federal government needs to maintain safeguards and regulations that are in place to protect birds while ordinary people must alter their ways by shunning pesticides, preserving a variety of habitats and simply giving more regard to the fellow creatures they share the Earth with. If we can do these things, the birds will be fine. Don’t take my word for it. Look at the examples of Wisdom the Laysan albatross and a California condor known as “1K.”

Photo by Bryan Stevens • Canada geese forage in a field in Unicoi County, Tennessee.

Birds made the headlines around the world last year with some important stories

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wisdom

Photo by Bob Peyton/USFWS • At 67, Wisdom, a female Laysan albatross and the world’s oldest known breeding bird in the wild, is a mother once more! On Feb. 6, 2018, approximately two months after Wisdom began incubating her egg, Wisdom and her mate, Akeakamai, welcomed their newest chick to the nesting colony at Midway Atoll. In this photo, Wisdom is pictured with her most her recent chick.

In these early days of 2019, I thought it might be a good time to look back at some of the top bird-related stories of 2018. Here are my Top Five picks:

Mother of Mothers
Wisdom the albatross nested again at age 67. Wisdom, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service website, is the oldest known banded bird in the wild. She is a female Laysan albatross that nests within the world’s largest albatross colony on Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge. She is at least 67 years old and a world-renowned symbol of hope for all species that depend upon the health of the ocean to survive.
Famed ornithology expert Chandler Robbins banded Wisdom on Dec. 10, 1956. Forty-six years later, he banded her again.
Albatrosses and other seabirds return to the same nesting site each year. Wisdom has been using the same nesting site on Midway Atoll since she was first banded. Albatrosses lay a single egg and incubate it for a little over two months. After a chick hatches, it will still be another five months before it will leave the nest. In that time, Wisdom and her mate, Akeakamai, like all albatross parents, take turns incubating the egg or caring for the chick while the other forages for food at sea.
“Midway Atoll’s habitat doesn’t just contain millions of birds, it contains countless generations and families of albatrosses,” said Kelly Goodale, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Refuge Biologist, in a press release. “If you can imagine when Wisdom returns home, she is likely surrounded by what were once her chicks and potentially their chicks. What a family reunion!”
Wisdom’s also a real survivor. For instance, she survived, along with her chick, the earthquake and tsunami that killed many Laysan and black-footed albatrosses on Midway Atoll in 2011.

Wisdom_Returns_to_Feed_Her_Chick

Photo by U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service • Wisdom feeds a chick from a previous nesting.

New Discoveries
New birds continue to be discovered around the world. For example, a research team has described an unusual new songbird species. The bird was named the Rote leaf-warbler (Phylloscopus rotiensis) after the island where it is found.
This new species of leaf-warbler, which has an unusually long bill, was first discovered on Rote Island, Indonesia.
Each year, about five to 10 new bird species are described worldwide. The fact that this bird is the second novel species described from Rota last year is also noteworthy. The other species — the Rote myzomela (Myzomela irianawidodoae) is a species of Indonesian honeyeater endemic to the island of Rote. Although first noticed years ago, scientists only confirmed this past year the the bird is actually a distinct species.
On this one small island in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana islands live two other birds found nowhere else in the world: the Mariana crow and the Rota white-eye. These birds are testimony to both the resilience and fragility of the world’s birds.
Mixed Heritage
In an example of the fluidity of some species of birds, experts have confirmed a rare three-species hybrid with DNA from three different New World warbler species. As the warblers are my favorite family of birds, I found this a fascinating story.
The bird found in Pennsylvania was the offspring of a hybrid warbler mother and a warbler father from an entirely different genus. This is a combination never recorded before now, which resulted in a three-species hybrid bird. The bird is the offspring of a female hybrid between a blue-winged warbler and a golden-winged warbler. Its father was a chestnut-sided warbler, which is not considered a close relative of the other two warblers

California_Condor

Photo by U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service • Endangered California condors receives some good news in 2018.

Condors Soar Again
California condors continue to climb back from the brink of extinction. For the first time in more than three decades, an endangered California condor chick successfully fledged from a cliff-side nest in Santa Barbara County in California in November of 2018. Condor number 933 took its first short flight after being raised by its parents for six months in the northern Santa Barbara backcountry of Los Padres National Forest. This chick represents another milestone in the condor recovery program: the first second-generation wild fledgling in Southern California. Its father fledged from the Santa Barbara backcountry in 1980.
The chick known as Condor 933 hatched in late April and was raised by six-year-old female condor 654 and 38-year-old male condor 20, more popularly known as AC-4.
Official USFWS statistics from December 2016 recorded an overall population of 446 condors, of which 276 are wild and 170 are captive. A key milestone was reached in 2015, when more condors were born in the wild than died.
The goal of the California Condor Recovery Plan is to establish two geographically distinct self-sustaining populations, each with 150 birds in the wild and at least 15 breeding pairs, with a third population of condors retained in captivity. As the Recovery Program works toward this goal, the number of release sites has grown. There are three active release sites in California, one in Arizona and one in Baja, Mexico.

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Photo by Noah Kahn/USFWS • The endangered ‘Apapane evolved in the forests of Hawaii and is found nowhere else in the world. This bird was banded and released back to the forest. Apapane are one of the most common native birds in Hawaiian forests. Their feathers were used to some extent in Hawaiian feather work. Another Hawaiian species, the poʻo-uli, was officially declared extinct in 2018.

Slipping Away
Despite the success stories, birds are getting hit hard in the age of extinction sweeping our planet. Some of this year’s extinction casualties included a diminutive Hawaiian species known as the , as well as the Brazilian birds known as the cryptic treehunter and the Alagoas foliage-gleaner. Spix’s macaw — a parrot species made famous by Disney’s animated feature film Rio — is now extinct in the wild, although about 50 individuals survive in captivity. The announcement about the macaw was a formality. Scientists have suspected the species is extinct in the wild since 2011 when the last known female Spix’s macaw perished. The announcement in September of 2018 served as a mere formality. Unfortunately, things will probably only get worse for many bird species in the short-term future. We must never begrudge the resources needed to keep them all flying free.