UKH

73, and still going to work on an egg!

https://www.birdguides.com/news/worlds-oldest-known-bird-breeding-again-at-...

Love it, absolutely love it. Amazing story.

I love the way the story talks about her “partner”. Sometimes there’s nothing wrong with anthropomorphism.

Surely "husband" would have been the anthropomorphological term.

Puffins live for ages, think 42 is the oldest ringed bird etc. When they leave the nest, young ones spend 4 years at sea, never coming to land until ready to mate, and mate for life iirc. 

I'm not sure it even is anthropomorphism.  They mate for life and might raise quite a few chicks together so it seems appropriate. 🙂

I just had to google this.

Albatrosses have been known to cover 120,000 km in a year, circumnavigating the southern pole several times. Let‘s say this old lady averaged 80,000; that would give her a total of maybe 5.6 million km to date, which is more than 7 times to the moon and back, most of it gliding on the longest wings of all birds (up to 3.4m wingspan).

Albatrosses reach sexual maturity between 11 and 15 years of age, and only one egg is laid per year. If she’s been at it since she was 15, in every year she‘s covered maybe 80,000 km per year hunting cephalopods, dead and foolish fish, and ship refuse in order to lay one single egg per year whose fledgling has a 33% chance of survival. Nature is incredible; I doff my woollen hat to this Grande Dame of the Southern Ocean!

I think you must have googled a slightly different species.  Wisdom is a Laysan Albatross and a Grande Dame of the Northern Pacific.  These albatrosses reach sexual maturity at 5, and she's reckoned to be 73 years old on the assumption that she was 5 when first ringed during the breeding season of 1956.

You've got to love a puffin.   They seem like such dainty little birds, and then you think about the conditions they survive in, the storms etc. 

I think arctic terns take the biscuit for that though, to look at them they seem so fragile!  (If you're looking at them from a respectful distance away from their nests anyway - otherwise not so much!)

Ah ok, I just googled Albatrosses in general, thanks!

Wow she's the same age as me! Looking a lot better than me though.

They are fine. Basically just fish that float and sometimes fly. On land they are a fish out of water.

Thanks for posting a link to this smiley story.

Oceanic birds, those that live most of their lives out on the open sea, are truly remarkable considering the harsh environment they live in.

Puffins, mentioned above, live most of their life out on the open sea, only coming ashore to breed. Outside the breeding season they travel to the Bay of Biscay, the Mediterranean, the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, and the fjords of Norway amongst other places.

Northern Fulmars, a bird that many sea cliff climbers will be familiar with, may travel thousands of miles out into the Atlantic over several days to find food which is then converted into "oil" to feed their single chick.

Albatrosses circumnavigating the stormy southern oceans can lock their wings in place with special tendons in their shoulder, and thus use barely any more energy when flying than when resting on land.

The oldest known UK bird was a Manx Shearwater, a species closely related to the albatrosses, which lived into its fifties, yet is tiny compared to the albatrosses. Their winter migration takes them on a lengthy figure of eight circuit through the southern Atlantic and back. Their close relatives, the Sooty Shearwater, does the opposite. Their nearest breeding colonies are on the Falkland Islands. They visit UK waters on their own migrations in the late northern hemisphere summer before returning south.

I've been following the life of Wisdom for several years now. I want to come back as a seabird in my next life.

For anyone interested in this sort of thing I can recommend "Far from Land: The Mysterious Lives of Seabirds" by Michael Brooke as a good introduction.

Isle of May puffins

Good luck with returning as a sea bird.  Hope you don't get caught by a Long-line.

I'll take my chances. Don't want to be a human in the next playthrough.

I'm slightly surprised to find myself saying this on a 'bird appreciation' thread, but puffins are not fish, and their ability to survive in the incredibly harsh environment of a mid-Atlantic storm is pretty remarkable.

Also they're not particularly poorly adapted to life on land during their visits in the breeding season, certainly no more so than other ground nesting aquatic birds.  It's the Manx Shearwater (scientific name, funnily enough, puffinus puffinus) that's really not cut out for being on land.  Shearwaters are much more efficient in the air than puffins at the cost that they're much worse at walking about on land, so even during the breeding season they only visit their burrows under cover of darkness to avoid predation.

How interested do you need to be?  I see some glowing reviews and a few suggesting that it's a bit dry and can be hard going for, well, numpties like me! 

Would you also recommend it for someone who is moderately interested, but doesn't really know much?  (Say, for the sake of argument, someone who loves the birdy photos we've been seeing on here lately but never has a clue and can't really be arsed with the 'spot the species' threads.)

I've got to admit, I agree with you......

Fairly interested I would say. It's not an acedemic book as such but does go into some depth about seabirds in general, where they breed and why, what they do out at sea outside the breeding season, where they go, how we manage to study them, how they are adapted to the marine environment, etc. I can see how some people might find it a bit dry - I don't, but then I am autistic!!!

It doesn't cover every species as there are quite a lot most of which you are likely to have never heard of let alone seen. It does cover the whole world and there is some bias towards the southern hemisphere as that is where most of the world's ocean is and where most of the seabirds are found although the UK is a decent North Atlantic hotspot.

I think it is a good introduction to the world of seabirds generally but based on what you say above I think perhaps it is not the book for you. There is a book called "The Seabirds Cry" by Adam Nicolson. It is much more UK centric although still sometimes wanders elsewhere. It's pretty highly rated and is said to be very readable though personally I don't get on with Adam Nicolson's writing style. It might be worth checking out though.

Actually, having read your other posts on this thread I'm not quite so sure if the book I recommended is for you or not. You clearly do have some knowledge already so perhaps the best I can say is to try and track down copies of both in a bookshop and have a good scan through first.

Thanks very much - I've just taken a punt and ordered a second-hand copy of that one.  I think I'll go old-school and check out the other book at the library.