Volunteer for the Midway Atoll annual albatross count

Nancy Caruso sat on an island in the North Pacific Ocean just inches from an albatross and watched as the large black-and-white seabird with a 12-foot wingspan added grass to its nest to cover up a precious 4-inch white egg.

Each year, albatross pairs typically have just one egg. The eggs incubate for 60 days and crack open in the fourth week of January. From then, the chicks spend six months on the islands of the Midway Atoll, growing and learning to fly.

The massive seabirds spend their lives on their wings, soaring up to 500 miles a day and cruising at 80 mph with barely a flap, so developing flight skills is critical to survival. They are known to travel incredible distances without rest and are rarely spotted.

Seeing the birds close up was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for the Southern California marine biologist, who was part of a team of 12 citizen scientists who recently spent six days a week for three weeks counting albatross nests on the Midway Atoll.

“I was handing them pieces of grass,” Caruso said of her experience helping U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials with their annual albatross nest count. The atoll, a U.S. territory, is home to the largest albatross colony on the planet, with nearly 70% of the Laysan albatross population and about one-third of the world’s black-footed albatrosses.

“They’d go about their business preening, and they’d talk to their egg,” Caruso said. “I’d sit and watch them do their dances. There aren’t many places in the world where you can be among them.”

Counting albatross annually

The wildlife department — along with the Friends of Midway Atoll — have tracked the birds since 1991, after the islands became a marine sanctuary and national monument.

The count starts in December and must be completed in 21 days by the nesting albatross census team.

The charter plane Caruso took from Honolulu to the islands landed at night to avoid the birds. The group bunked in old military barracks. After breakfast the next morning, they rode bikes along gravel paths to get their gear and start counting.

The gear included snowshoes because another of the island’s birds, the Bonin petrel, burrows deep tunnels into the ground to nest.

“Every step you take, you could fall into a hole up to your waist,” Caruso said. “Then you’d have to get up and dig the bird out.”

To start the count, the volunteers, who came from different backgrounds and from across the nation, formed a line standing 5 feet apart and moved along, passing nesting adults and counting each nest with a clicker.

“We’d get to the endpoint and then go back the other way,” Caruso said. “We covered the entire islands, and I walked 196 miles.”

After 21 days — volunteers took Sundays, Christmas and New Year’s Day off — the group had counted 29,562 black-footed albatross and 498,448 Laysan albatross nests for a total of 528,010 nests. About 80% of the eggs typically hatch, but only about 30% of fledglings survive.

An estimated 1.5 million albatross live on the atoll, said Dan Cullinane, a retired biology teacher who led the count.

“It’s nice to be able to walk among the albatross, and you’re counting more than 500,000 nests,” he said, adding that since the birds have no natural predators on land, they do not fear humans. Heat and dehydration — if chicks can’t be found when the parents return to feed them — are their biggest enemies.

Doing the albatross dance

The volunteers were treated to the seabirds’ mating dance.

Young birds do not return to land until their third year after fledging. When they return, they learn to perfect their dance moves, build nests and look for a possible mate. Birds first breed between 5 and 8 years of age.

The dance is done to identify a mate; the better the dance, the more coveted a bird becomes. The dances are complex, with several moves.

Once mated, birds fine-tune the dance and use the moves to identify their partner when returning to Midway to mate again, Cullinane said. After a chick fledges, the pairs separate for the rest of the year and return to Midway when it’s time to breed, he said.

Birds who lose a mate, either because it doesn’t return to Midway or suffers some other fate, go through a new courting process.

Such is the case with Midway’s oldest bird, Wisdom, said Cullinane. Famous among birders, Wisdom was first banded by scientists in 1956. She was seen dancing again, on the prowl for her third mate. But age becomes her well, Cullinane said, because she looks physically no different from younger birds.

Sharing the experience

A sad discovery for Caruso was the tremendous amount of trash and debris she and others picked up from around nests and beaches. Along with litter washing ashore, the seabirds often pick up plastics from the ocean.

She had bags of litter with her when she recently spoke to eighth-graders at a Fountain Valley, California, middle school. She said many were “slack-jawed” by what she shared, especially by the albatross dance moves.

Even more thrilled was Daryth Morrisey, who teaches marine biology. Eliminating single-use plastic is a message she said she wants to deliver loud and clear to her students.

“I start off the year with a plastic pollution unit,” she said. “To gift me a piece of regurgitated plastic from an albatross is a priceless teaching tool.”