How a same-sex albatross couple ‘love story’ captured hearts

An albatross romance is warming the hearts of Sir David Attenborough fans. But there is worrying news for these endangered seabirds. Andrea Vance reports.

Apair of New Zealand albatrosses in a same-sex partnership have captured the hearts of Sir David Attenborough fans, going viral after a clip of their courtship aired in Britain.

But new research on the Antipodean albatross/toroa shows the outlook for the endangered bird remains bleak, likely to be extinct within 30 years.

At least 2% of the population are lost each year in fatal encounters with commercial fishing vessels.

But that number is just the tip of the iceberg – because most deaths on the high seas go unreported. A suspected 2300 die each year.

Kath Walker and Graeme Elliot have spent up to 30 summers on the wave-lashed Antipodes Islands researching New Zealand’s most endangered seabird. The majestic ocean wanderer only breeds there and further south on Campbell Island.

Earlier this year, they were accompanied by the BBC crew shooting Frozen Planet II.

Department of Conservation scientists found the number nesting in 2022 across the Antipodes was estimated to be 2927 pairs, the second-lowest ever recorded. Since 2020, the scientists have fitted more than 150 trackers to the birds. One of the tracked males died in a Chinese longlining vessel in the first year.

Last year, between May and August, the transmitters of three juveniles stopped close to pelagic longline vessels, which suggests they were caught. The bands of a tagged juvenile and a 25-year-old female were also recovered from a Taiwanese longliner. The birds were killed in the same fortnight in June.

By the end of July this year, 17 of 40 stopped transmitting.

Their decline has long been attributed to high levels of fisheries-related deaths in the

Pacific Ocean, where longline vessels are targeting albacore tuna.

With a three-metre wingspan fully grown, they forage over the continental shelf edge and deep water from south of Western Australia to the coast of Chile, and can fly up to 100 kilometres in an hour.

But in recent years, sea-surface temperature changes caused by global warming are making their prey scarce and driving the albatross to forage further north, where they encounter fishing fleets on the high seas.

Increasingly, they travel longer distances to find food, which also affects their condition for breeding. More than half the females on Antipodes Island have vanished at sea.

‘‘The magnitude of fisheries mortality is such that its elimination would result in a substantial improvement in the Antipodean albatross population trajectory,’’ the scientists’ report read.

Their numbers, which began to decline sharply in 2005, are ‘‘showing no sign of recovery.’’

The population of breeding females has been roughly stable for the past four years, but the report reveals there are about 1.5 times as many males as females. Modelling reveals the improved female survivorship is not great enough to cause population increase.

Same-sex romances are becoming more prevalent in the albatross community on the island, as females outnumber males.

An episode of the BBC’s Frozen Planet II, which aired in Britain last month, featured a pair of young male albatrosses finding romance. Attenborough narrates, attributing the blame for the decline in the population of females to commercial fishing practices in their feeding grounds.

The series, which airs in New Zealand on TVNZ early next year, is expected to reach 1 billion viewers.

WWF-NZ acting chairperson Lou Sanson said great care is needed if New Zealand is to avoid its first extinction of an albatross species. ‘‘The albatross is the new of the oceans.’’ The environmental NGO is putting pressure on the Government to change the rules around seabird bycatch mitigation. Domestic fishing regulations are weaker than those recommended in an international treaty, the Agreement on the Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels.

The 20-year-old pact, created to halt the decline of seabirds in the southern hemisphere, recommends the simultaneous use of three measures, but in New Zealand, pelagic longline operators only have to use two.

‘‘One of the saddest things is that we raised all that money for the Million Dollar Mouse project to rid the island of predators,’’ Sanson said.

‘‘We got that island in incredible shape and now the problem is miles away from that island.’’

The years-long project eradicated more than 200,000 mice – also a threat to the erect-crested penguin, and two species of parakeet, all of which are found nowhere else.

Along with NZ Nature Fund, Live Ocean – the charity founded by Olympic medallists Peter Burling and Blair Tuke – and Southern Seabird Solutions, WWF are aiming to raise $100,000 for bycatch mitigation.

A fundraising dinner on March 9, will mark the launch of Frozen Planet II in New Zealand.