Albatross
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40 free Albatross trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Few birds have a reputation like the albatross. It can stay at sea for years at a stretch, cross whole oceans on wings that barely move, and live for decades, often pairing with the same mate season after season. Sailors once treated it with awe, and a single poem turned it into a byword for a burden that will not go away. This quiz covers the bird from every side. There are questions on how albatrosses fly, feed and breed, on the remote islands where they nest, and on the dangers they face from fishing fleets, ocean litter and introduced predators. Others follow the name into culture: a famous poem, a golf score, a chart-topping instrumental, a comedy sketch, an animated film and a record-setting aircraft. It suits trivia nights, bird lovers, students and anyone who has wondered why the albatross looms so large in stories of the sea. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you leave knowing a little more than when you started.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which species of the Southern Ocean has the greatest known wingspan of any living bird, reaching 3.7 metres?
Wandering albatross
The wandering albatross can glide for hours without a single wingbeat, covering about 22 metres for every metre it sinks.
Q 02In 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', which weapon does the sailor use to shoot the albatross that guided his ship?
Crossbow
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.
Q 03What name was given to the Laysan albatross, banded in 1956, that is the oldest known wild bird in the world?
Wisdom
Wisdom was already an adult when a biologist first tagged her, and she was still laying eggs past the age of 70.
Q 04Which San Francisco Bay island bears the Spanish word for pelican that sailors probably turned into 'albatross'?
Alcatraz
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.
Q 05On remote Gough Island, which introduced animals eat Tristan albatross chicks alive on the nest?
House mice
House mice on Gough have grown unusually large, and the chicks, though far bigger, do not know how to defend themselves.
Q 06Which name do American golfers usually give an albatross, a score of three under par on a single hole?
Double eagle
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.
Q 07Which band scored its only UK number-one single with 'Albatross', a guitar instrumental released in 1968?
Fleetwood Mac
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.
Q 08Most birds hunt by sight, but which sense do albatrosses rely on to find food across open ocean?
Smell
Smell is their guide, served by the long tubular nostrils on the bill that earned albatrosses and their relatives the nickname tubenoses.
Q 09Which body of water did the pedal-powered aircraft Gossamer Albatross cross in 1979 to win the Kremer prize?
English Channel
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.
Q 10Which Monty Python member plays the cinema vendor with a dead albatross on a tray in a famous Flying Circus sketch?
John Cleese
John Cleese, dressed as an ice-cream girl, offers the seabird instead of the usual snacks to a customer played by Terry Jones.
Q 11Which Pacific atoll, where the birds are nicknamed gooneys, holds about 70 percent of the world's Laysan albatrosses?
Midway
Midway's birds collided with military aircraft so often that flights were badly disrupted until the naval air base closed in 1993.
Q 12Chris Jordan's photographs of dead Laysan albatross chicks showed their bodies packed with which human-made material?
Plastic
Plastic adrift at sea is mistaken for food by the parents, and chicks under about four months old cannot cough it back up.
Q 13Which practice of commercial fleets kills the most albatrosses, which are lured to the gear, snagged and drowned?
Longlining
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.
Q 21Which 1977 Disney film features Orville, an ungainly albatross who flies the tiny heroes to a bayou on his back?
The Rescuers
The Rescuers nearly used a pigeon instead, until an animator remembered nature footage of the seabirds' clumsy take-offs and landings.
Q 22Which poet's 1798 poem about a cursed sailor made the albatross a lasting symbol of a burden that cannot be shed?
Coleridge
Coleridge took the idea from Wordsworth, who had been reading about a melancholy privateer shooting a black albatross on a 1719 voyage.
Q 23A large sculpture showing an albatross in silhouette honours the sailors who died rounding which notorious headland?
Cape Horn
Q 14Albatrosses belong to the order Procellariiformes, the tubenoses, alongside shearwaters and which other seabirds?
Petrels
Petrels and shearwaters are the closest kin, and the order's name comes from the Latin procella, meaning a violent wind or storm.
Q 15Which feature lets an albatross hold its huge wings outstretched for hours with no muscular effort at all?
Locking shoulder tendon
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.
Q 16Which flight technique, described by Lord Rayleigh in 1883, lets albatrosses cross oceans with barely a wingbeat?
Dynamic soaring
Dynamic soaring means crossing again and again between slow air near the waves and faster wind above, gaining a little energy each time.
Q 17Albatrosses roam most of the world's oceans, but which has none apart from rare strays?
North Atlantic
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.
Q 18Which sea creature, often scavenged dead from the surface, is the main food of many albatross species?
Squid
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.
Q 19The waved albatross, one of few tropical species, breeds almost entirely on Española in which island group?
Galápagos Islands
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.
Q 20Taiaroa Head, the only mainland royal albatross colony, lies within the limits of which New Zealand city?
Dunedin
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.
Cape Horn's memorial, by Chilean sculptor José Balcells, echoes an old seafaring belief that the birds were the souls of lost sailors.
Q 24Michael Gross, nicknamed 'The Albatross' for his 2.13-metre arm span, won three Olympic gold medals in which sport?
Swimming
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.
Q 25The Amsterdam albatross, one of the rarest birds, breeds only on an Indian Ocean island governed by which country?
France
France administers Amsterdam Island, where the species was recognised only in 1983 from a population of just five breeding pairs.
Q 26A stray black-browed albatross nicknamed Albert spent many summers in Scotland living in colonies of which seabirds?
Gannets
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.
Q 27Which US president made Hawaii's remote outer islands a bird reserve in 1909 after poachers slaughtered albatrosses?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt signed the executive order as poachers were killing the birds by the hundred thousand for their plumes.
Q 28Nearly wiped out by feather hunters, the short-tailed albatross nests mainly on a volcanic island of which country?
Japan
Japan's Torishima held the last survivors: the species was declared extinct in 1949, yet about 50 young birds were still out at sea.
Q 29At a Laysan albatross colony on Oahu, nearly a third of nesting pairs turned out to consist of what?
Two females
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.
Q 30Scientists fitted Southern Ocean albatrosses with tracking loggers so the birds could help authorities locate what?
Illegal fishing boats
Illegal fishing boats betray themselves by radar, which the loggers sense, and over a third of vessels met in international waters were running dark.