SUPPORTING ALBATROSS CONSERVATION
The Royal Albatross Centre is owned and operated by the Otago Peninsula Trust; New Zealand’s oldest not for profit charitable conservation trust.
The Otago Peninsula Trust does not receive any government funding, so any conservation efforts we help to fund for the Department of Conservation who directly care for the albatross, as well as the running of our visitor centre which is free for anyone to access, is all raised through visitors joining our guided tours or through donations online.
Understandably, running costs are expensive, particularly due to our remote location at the end of the Otago Peninsula as everything needs to be transported out to us from Dunedin city.
Your support allows us to continue our increasingly important advocacy work to inspire people to care about our taonga species whilst protecting and enhancing the colony of albatross that call Pukekura home. Read below to learn more about how donations are used.
Supplementary Feeding
Chicks are weighed every 1-2 weeks throughout the season to ensure they are healthy and can develop as they should. Depending on the age and sex of the chick, the rangers can determine what the ideal weight should be for each one in the colony and will know whether any have fallen a little behind. Drops in weight could be due to a number of reasons; parents are struggling to forage sufficiently, one or both parents are missing and presumed deceased, or an illness in the chick preventing weight gain. Supplementary feeding underweight chicks is arguably one of the most important ways these donations are used as this undoubtedly saves the lives of many who otherwise wouldn’t have survived to fledge at the end of the season. Some chicks never require supplementary feeding at all, others require only a few, but roughly 100 kilograms of fish, squid, and octopus are purchased each season and given to those who need it.
Tracking
Little is known about the life of albatross at sea, and considering they are pelagic seabirds that spend roughly 80% of their life on the open ocean, it leaves a large amount of information still left to discover. One way conservation staff have been able to learn more about these albatross is through GPS and GLS tracking. GPS (global positioning system) allows us to have regular live locations of the bird as it moves at sea, both whilst foraging closer to the NZ coast and whilst migrating hundreds of kilometres across the Southern Ocean. The tracker is attached to a few of the back feathers and can gather data for several months to a year; as long as it takes for those feathers to be moulted and replaced in which the tracker is lost at sea. GLS (global location sensor) is slightly different in that it does not give a live location and the data can only be retreived once the bird returns, but the huge upside is that these trackers are much smaller allowing them to be attached to the birds’ leg band so they aren’t lost when the bird moults, giving a much longer data collection time (in some cases several years). Tracking is expensive, but better understanding the flightpaths and patterns of albatross at sea is invaluable as it allows potential mapping of overlap and interaction with fishing vessels during foraging. There have even been cases of uncovering illegal or unreported fishing activity in areas where high proportions of tracked albatross were congregating.
Conservation Equipment
Department of Conservation staff require a lot of equipment to monitor the albatross. Like most seabirds, albatross have no sexual dimorphism so each bird in the colony essentially looks identical to the rest. Identifying individual birds is paramount when it comes to the monitoring of the colony for several reasons. This is particularly important for determining how long one parent has been on the nest during egg incubation as it can indicate a missing partner, dramatically increasing the risk of nest abandonment. This may prompt rangers to preemptively swap the real egg for a dummy ahead of time, a precaution that has saved countless viable eggs in past seasons. It also allows rangers to easily track which chick is which when undertaking health checks, particularly as they grow through the winter months and become mobile, often wandering far from their nest site.
One of the biggest risks to hatching chicks is fly strike; blowflies laying larvae inside the egg as the chick begins pipping (breaking through the shell), leading to high risk of infection and death for the chick. In the past, different techniques have been used to deter flies during hatching (peppermint oils to mask the smell, fly traps etc.) but these were never fully effective. In current seasons, all eggs are taken from the nest at the first sign of hatching and are replaced with a dummy egg for the parents to incubate, allowing chicks to safely hatch inside an incubator before being placed back in their natal nest. There are several incubators stationed on the headland ready for use during hatching in late January. This is one of the most valuable recent additions to the management of the colony as it has proven to eliminate fly strike.