Endangered
Northern Royal Albatross
Diomedea sanfordi
The northern royal albatross or toroa, is a large seabird in the albatross family.
Appearance
The juvenile has a white head, neck, upper mantle, rump, and underparts. Its lower mantle and back are white with more black speckling than the crown, and it has dark black-brown upper wings with white flecks on its coverts. Its tail is white with a black-brown tip, as are its underwings.
The northern royal albatross is typically about 115 cm (45 in) tall, weighs 6.2 to 8.2 kg (14–18 lb), and has a wingspan from 270 to 305 cm (106–120 in).
Range and habitat
Northern royal albatrosses nest on the Chatham Islands (Forty-fours Island, Big Sister Island, and Little Sister Island), Enderby Island in the Auckland Islands, and Taiaroa Head on the Otago Peninsula of New Zealand. The Taiaroa Head colony is the only albatross colony found on a human-inhabited mainland in the Southern Hemisphere. When they are not breeding, northern royal albatrosses undertake circumpolar flights in the southern oceans, and in particular like the Humboldt Current and the Patagonian Shelf.
Northern royal albatrosses are listed as an endangered species by the IUCN, and they have an occurrence range of 64,300,000 km2 (24,800,000 sq mi), with a breeding range of 8 km2 (3.1 sq mi). 6,500 to 7,000 pairs breed on the Chatham Islands annually along with 60 pairs at Taiaroa Head, for an estimated total of 20,000 birds, although this is a 2012 estimate. 2022 estimates place the count at 17,000 birds. In 1985, their main breeding grounds on the Chatham Islands were badly damaged by a series of intense storms and the resulting lack of nesting material has lowered their breeding success.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
Squids can make up 85% of their diet. Breeding starts at eight years.
A single egg is laid, in October or November, that takes both parents around 80 days to incubate.
In crisis
Chicks and eggs of birds breeding on the South Island have also been preyed upon by introduced species, such as cats, bottle flies, and stoats. Finally, longline fishing is the biggest threat to this bird, even though it has been reduced. To help in the survival of this species, bird banding is underway, Taiaroa Head has predator control in effect during the breeding season, and there are no predators on the Chatham Islands.
Counting of individual birds has been made possible using 30-cm resolution imagery from the WorldView-3 satellite.
Northern Royal 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 Northern Royal Albatross, Wikidata item Q2464919. 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.
