40 Fun Facts About Albatross

Which species of the Southern Ocean has the greatest known wingspan of any living bird, reaching 3.7 metres?

The wandering albatross can glide for hours without a single wingbeat, covering about 22 metres for every metre it sinks.

In 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', which weapon does the sailor use to shoot the albatross that guided his ship?

A crossbow brings down the bird that had led the ship out of the ice, and the angry crew then hang its body around the mariner's neck.

What name was given to the Laysan albatross, banded in 1956, that is the oldest known wild bird in the world?

Wisdom was already an adult when a biologist first tagged her, and she was still laying eggs past the age of 70.

Which San Francisco Bay island bears the Spanish word for pelican that sailors probably turned into 'albatross'?

Alcatraz comes from an old Spanish word for pelican, and seafarers seem to have bent the same word into a new bird name, nudged by the Latin for white.

On remote Gough Island, which introduced animals eat Tristan albatross chicks alive on the nest?

House mice on Gough have grown unusually large, and the chicks, though far bigger, do not know how to defend themselves.

Which name do American golfers usually give an albatross, a score of three under par on a single hole?

Double eagle is the American term, while the rest of the golfing world extends the game's bird theme to one of the largest fliers of all.

Which band scored its only UK number-one single with 'Albatross', a guitar instrumental released in 1968?

Fleetwood Mac reached the top in January 1969, and George Harrison later said the Beatles used the piece as the starting point for a song of their own.

Most birds hunt by sight, but which sense do albatrosses rely on to find food across open ocean?

Smell is their guide, served by the long tubular nostrils on the bill that earned albatrosses and their relatives the nickname tubenoses.

Which body of water did the pedal-powered aircraft Gossamer Albatross cross in 1979 to win the Kremer prize?

The English Channel crossing took cyclist Bryan Allen 2 hours 49 minutes of pedalling, at an average height of about five feet above the waves.

Which Monty Python member plays the cinema vendor with a dead albatross on a tray in a famous Flying Circus sketch?

John Cleese, dressed as an ice-cream girl, offers the seabird instead of the usual snacks to a customer played by Terry Jones.

Which Pacific atoll, where the birds are nicknamed gooneys, holds about 70 percent of the world's Laysan albatrosses?

Midway's birds collided with military aircraft so often that flights were badly disrupted until the naval air base closed in 1993.

Chris Jordan's photographs of dead Laysan albatross chicks showed their bodies packed with which human-made material?

Plastic adrift at sea is mistaken for food by the parents, and chicks under about four months old cannot cough it back up.

Which practice of commercial fleets kills the most albatrosses, which are lured to the gear, snagged and drowned?

Longlining can be made far safer for seabirds by setting bait at night, dyeing it blue or weighting the lines so they sink out of reach.

Albatrosses belong to the order Procellariiformes, the tubenoses, alongside shearwaters and which other seabirds?

Petrels and shearwaters are the closest kin, and the order's name comes from the Latin procella, meaning a violent wind or storm.

Which feature lets an albatross hold its huge wings outstretched for hours with no muscular effort at all?

A locking shoulder tendon fixes the wing once it is fully spread, so an albatross's heart rate in flight stays close to its resting rate.

Which flight technique, described by Lord Rayleigh in 1883, lets albatrosses cross oceans with barely a wingbeat?

Dynamic soaring means crossing again and again between slow air near the waves and faster wind above, gaining a little energy each time.

Albatrosses roam most of the world's oceans, but which has none apart from rare strays?

The North Atlantic once had its own albatrosses: the remains of a colony have been dug up in Bermuda, thought to have been drowned by rising seas.

Which sea creature, often scavenged dead from the surface, is the main food of many albatross species?

Squid beaks coughed up by the birds show many were too big to have been caught alive, and some probably came from the vomit of whales.

The waved albatross, one of few tropical species, breeds almost entirely on Española in which island group?

The Galápagos Islands bird is named for the wave-like pattern on its adult feathers, and it finds its food off the coast of South America.

Taiaroa Head, the only mainland royal albatross colony, lies within the limits of which New Zealand city?

Dunedin rings the bells of its public buildings each year for the first bird back at the colony, which began with a single egg found in 1919.

Which 1977 Disney film features Orville, an ungainly albatross who flies the tiny heroes to a bayou on his back?

The Rescuers nearly used a pigeon instead, until an animator remembered nature footage of the seabirds' clumsy take-offs and landings.

Which poet's 1798 poem about a cursed sailor made the albatross a lasting symbol of a burden that cannot be shed?

Coleridge took the idea from Wordsworth, who had been reading about a melancholy privateer shooting a black albatross on a 1719 voyage.

A large sculpture showing an albatross in silhouette honours the sailors who died rounding which notorious headland?

Cape Horn's memorial, by Chilean sculptor José Balcells, echoes an old seafaring belief that the birds were the souls of lost sailors.

Michael Gross, nicknamed 'The Albatross' for his 2.13-metre arm span, won three Olympic gold medals in which sport?

Swimming made the West German a star: he took two golds at the 1984 Games and a third in 1988, in freestyle and butterfly events.

The Amsterdam albatross, one of the rarest birds, breeds only on an Indian Ocean island governed by which country?

France administers Amsterdam Island, where the species was recognised only in 1983 from a population of just five breeding pairs.

A stray black-browed albatross nicknamed Albert spent many summers in Scotland living in colonies of which seabirds?

Gannets were his only company after he was apparently blown off course in 1967, and in the Faroes such a stray is known as a gannet king.

Which US president made Hawaii's remote outer islands a bird reserve in 1909 after poachers slaughtered albatrosses?

Theodore Roosevelt signed the executive order as poachers were killing the birds by the hundred thousand for their plumes.

Nearly wiped out by feather hunters, the short-tailed albatross nests mainly on a volcanic island of which country?

Japan's Torishima held the last survivors: the species was declared extinct in 1949, yet about 50 young birds were still out at sea.

At a Laysan albatross colony on Oahu, nearly a third of nesting pairs turned out to consist of what?

Two females pair up because the colony has only two males for every three females, and they can raise a chick once a male fertilises an egg.

Scientists fitted Southern Ocean albatrosses with tracking loggers so the birds could help authorities locate what?

Illegal fishing boats betray themselves by radar, which the loggers sense, and over a third of vessels met in international waters were running dark.

The scientific name of the great albatrosses honours which Greek hero, whose companions were said to turn into birds?

Diomedes lends his name to the genus Diomedea, which Linnaeus chose in a nod to the myth of the warrior's transformed companions.

Which French poet's 'L'Albatros' likens the poet to a captured seabird mocked by sailors on a ship's deck?

Baudelaire is said to have drawn on a sea voyage he made in 1841, and he added the poem to the second edition of Les Fleurs du mal in 1861.

Which golfer's albatross at the 1935 Masters was nicknamed the shot heard round the world?

Gene Sarazen struck it with a wooden club called a spoon on the fifteenth hole, where a bridge at Augusta now carries his name.

Taylor Swift wrote and produced her 2024 bonus track 'The Albatross' with which longtime collaborator?

Aaron Dessner of The National helped shape the track as soft indie folk, first released on a physical edition of The Tortured Poets Department.

Albatross Books, a Hamburg paperback pioneer of 1932, inspired the format and colour-coded covers of which publisher?

Penguin founder Allen Lane borrowed the standard size, the plain typographic covers and the colours by genre, then hired an Albatross co-founder.

Which name, borrowed from Dutch, is given to the medium-sized albatrosses of the genus Thalassarche?

Mollymawks get their name from the Dutch mallemok, or foolish gull, probably because sailors found such birds so easy to catch.

Which engineer designed the Gossamer Albatross and its prize-winning predecessor, the Gossamer Condor?

Paul MacCready, a champion glider pilot, later received the Collier Trophy for the craft, whose empty frame weighed only 32 kg.

Which energy-rich liquid do albatrosses make from digested prey and carry home to feed their chicks?

Stomach oil is lighter to carry than whole prey, and it gives albatrosses and their relatives a distinctive musty odour.

Which sailor's shooting of a black albatross on a 1719 privateering voyage inspired 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'?

Simon Hatley appears as a melancholy figure in his captain's account of the voyage, the book a fellow poet was reading when the poem was planned.

Which archipelago off Argentina holds most of the world's black-browed albatrosses, the family's commonest species?

The Falkland Islands host about two-thirds of the breeding population, nesting there on flat coastal grassland rather than the usual steep slopes.