Albatrosses

I recently posted a photo of a boat we saw on our Invercargill trip with seagulls and albatrosses trailing behind, but I took the photo from land, a good distance away. A friend here in Dunedin, Helen, recently took a tourist boat out into Otago Harbour and got very close to albatrosses catching scraps of food off the back of a fishing boat. So these three photos were taken by Helen, not Dave and me. In the first photo, try to get a sense of just how big these birds are. They look deceptively like seagulls, but notice the man on the boat and the relative size of the birds.

These are Northern Royal Albatrosses. They weigh between 14 and 18 pounds and have a wingspan of 9 to 10 feet. At the end of Otago Harbour is an albatross nesting colony, the only nesting colony in the world on a mainland (if you call New Zealand a mainland). The birds are born here, then fly to South America and spend several years at sea doing their teenage thing, then return here to nest. The Department of Conservation puts transmitters on some of them. Recently the newspaper showed a map of where they spend their time off the southern shores of South America before they come back here to nest. The albatross colony at the end of the Otago Peninsula is a big tourist attraction. Below are a couple more photos Helen took from the tourist boat that went out to the mouth of the Harbour.