Endangered
Grey-headed Albatross
Thalassarche chrysostoma
The grey-headed albatross also known as the gray-headed mollymawk, is a large seabird from the albatross family.
Appearance
The grey-headed albatross averages 81 cm (32 in) in length and 2.2 m (7.2 ft) in wingspan. It has a dark ashy-grey head, throat, and upper neck, and its upper wings, mantle, and tail, are almost black. It has a white rump, underparts, and a white crescent behind its eyes.
Weight can range from 2.8 to 4.4 kg (6.2 to 9.7 lb), with a mean mass of 3.65 kg (8.0 lb).
Range and habitat
Grey-headed albatrosses nest in colonies on several islands in the Southern Ocean, with large colonies on South Georgia in the South Atlantic, and smaller colonies on Islas Diego Ramírez, Kerguelen Islands, Crozet Islands, Marion Island, and Prince Edward Islands in the Indian Ocean, Campbell Island and Macquarie Island south of New Zealand, and Chile. Birds that roost in the Marion Island area forage for food in the sub-tropical zone. Juveniles or non-breeding adults fly freely throughout all the southern oceans, north to 35°S.
It has a circumpolar distribution, nesting on isolated islands in the Southern Ocean and feeding at high latitudes, further south than any of the other mollymawks. Estimates place 48,000 pairs at South Georgia Island, 6,200 on Marion Island, 3,000 pairs on Prince Edward Islands, 7,800 pairs on Campbell Island, 16,408 pairs in Chile, 84 pairs on Macquarie Island, 5,940 on Crozet Island, and 7,905 on Kerguelen Islands Populations have been shrinking based on different studies.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Breeding
A single egg is laid in a large nest, typically built on steep slopes or cliffs with tussock grass, and incubated for 72 days. Chick will generally not return to the colony for 6–7 years after fledging, and will not breed for the first time until several years after that.
If a pair has managed to successfully raise a chick it will not breed in the following year, taking the year off. Tracking of 22 non-breeding grey-headed albatrosses revealed three strategies: remaining within the breeding home range, migrating to a particular area of the south-west Indian Ocean, or making one or more complete circumnavigations of the globe. The fastest recorded circumnavigation took 46 days.
In crisis
The IUCN classifies this bird as endangered due to rapidly declining numbers in South Georgia that holds around half the world's population. It has an occurrence range of 79,000,000 km2 (31,000,000 sq mi) and a breeding range of 1,800 km2 (690 sq mi), with a population, estimated in 2004, of 250,000.
Grey-headed Albatross is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Grey-headed Albatross, Wikidata item Q786350. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
