How Long Can Albatrosses Stay at Sea? Years Without Land

How long young albatrosses stay at sea

When a wandering albatross chick fledges, at about nine months old, it flies off over the Southern Ocean alone. Its parents do not go with it, and it has to learn to find food by itself. From then on, the sea is its only home.

Young wandering albatrosses typically return to their birth colony for the first time after about five or six years, sometimes a little earlier or later. Even then, they do not breed right away. They visit the colony during several seasons, practicing courtship dances and looking for a partner, and most do not breed until they are about 10 years old or older. Between visits, they head back out to sea.

Other albatrosses follow a similar pattern, though the timing differs. Smaller species such as the Laysan albatross of the North Pacific often return after about three to five years. In all of them, the first years of life are spent almost entirely on the wing or floating on the waves.

How long adults spend at sea

Adult wandering albatrosses also spend most of their lives at sea. A pair that raises a chick successfully takes about a year to do it, so it normally skips the next season. During this “sabbatical” year, both partners leave the island and travel widely before meeting again at the colony.

Even while breeding, adults make enormous trips. While one parent sits on the egg, the other flies off to feed and may be gone for one to three weeks. Early satellite tracking from the Crozet Islands in 1990 showed that these foraging trips could stretch to several thousand kilometers, up to about 15,000 km (9,300 mi). Later, while feeding a growing chick, parents alternate shorter and longer trips over the ocean.

Tracking has also shown how far nonbreeding albatrosses roam. In a 2005 study, scientists found that grey-headed albatrosses from South Georgia often circled the entire Southern Ocean during their year off, and one bird completed a full lap of the globe in just 46 days. Wandering albatrosses also make circumpolar journeys, sometimes covering well over 100,000 km (62,000 mi) in a year.

How they fly so far with so little energy

The secret is a flying technique called dynamic soaring. Over the ocean, the wind is slower close to the waves and faster a few meters higher up. An albatross:

1. Climbs into the faster wind, gaining height and energy.
2. Turns and glides downwind, picking up speed.
3. Swoops down into the slower air near the surface and turns back into the wind.
4. Repeats the loop again and again, zigzagging across the sea.

Long, narrow wings help it glide more than 20 m (66 ft) forward for every meter it sinks. A special tendon in the shoulder locks the wings in the outstretched position, so the bird does not have to use muscles just to hold them open. Heart-rate studies show that a soaring wandering albatross uses barely more energy than when it is resting on its nest. Most of its effort goes into takeoff and landing, not into traveling.

Wind is essential. Albatrosses live in the “roaring forties” and “furious fifties”, latitudes with some of the strongest and most constant winds on Earth. In a flat calm, they struggle to fly and usually just sit on the water until the wind returns.

Resting, sleeping and drinking at sea

Albatrosses are not in the air all the time. They regularly land on the sea surface to:

• Feed, by grabbing squid, fish and other prey from the surface or with shallow plunges.
• Rest and preen, floating high on the water like a large duck.
• Sleep, which is thought to happen mostly while floating, often at night.

Whether albatrosses also sleep in flight is still unknown. Some studies of frigatebirds have shown that seabirds can sleep with one half of the brain at a time while flying, in naps lasting seconds. It is possible that albatrosses do something similar, but this has not been demonstrated.

Albatrosses never need fresh water. They drink seawater and eat salty prey, then remove the extra salt through salt glands above the eyes. A salty fluid drains out through the tube nostrils on top of the bill, a feature shared with petrels and shearwaters, the group known as tubenoses.

Do albatrosses ever get tired?

Because flight costs them so little, albatrosses can travel day and night for long periods without obvious exhaustion. Sailors in the days of sail noted birds that followed ships for days, wheeling around the masts in calm and stormy weather alike.

Their real limits are food and weather. They must find enough squid and fish spread thinly across a vast ocean, and they rely on wind to move. Long trips also expose them to danger: many albatrosses die when they follow fishing boats and get caught on baited longline hooks. For a slow-breeding bird, those losses matter. Albatrosses can live for decades, as shown in How long do albatrosses live?, so every adult lost removes many future chicks.