Scientists on a research vessel off central California spotted a waved albatross, the Associated Press reported Thursday, marking just the second recorded sighting of the bird north of Central America.
The bird was seen about 23 miles (37 kilometers) off the coast of Point Piedras Blancas, roughly midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, the report said.
Researchers said the sighting added a mystery: the waved albatross is known to breed in the Galapagos Islands, roughly 3,000 miles (4,800 kilometers) away. To scientists, that kind of far-ranging individual is described as a “vagrant” bird traveling well outside its typical range.
Marine ornithologist Tammy Russell, who was on board the vessel, said the adult bird “doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to get back south,” adding that the same bird apparently had been spotted in October off the Northern California coast.
Russell later wrote on Facebook that “I can’t even believe what I saw,” and that she was “still in shock.” She is a contract scientist with the Farallon Institute and a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the report said.
In an email, Russell said it was “all but impossible to determine why” the bird ended up so far from its home. She said it could have been driven north by a storm and suggested that “some birds have a rambling spirit and just go farther than others.”
Russell also said the bird “likely didn’t breed last season because adults lay their egg in spring and the chicks leave the nests by January,” and she floated a scenario in which it went wandering during its year off. She wrote, “Perhaps it went wandering on its year off and will soon return to the Galapagos to be reunited with its mate for the next season?” She added: “Who knows how long it will stay around or if it will ever return?” and said, “But that’s why these sightings are so special.”
Marshall Iliff, an eBird project leader at Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology, said seabirds such as albatrosses can travel great distances in search of food, and he cautioned against drawing broad conclusions from a single bird. In an email, Iliff said a “routine” outcome is for an individual to turn up “far from home, even in the wrong hemisphere or exceptionally in the wrong ocean,” and he said “There is no evidence at this point that this is anything but a fluke.”
The report said Iliff noted that “Food shortages could prompt a bird to wander,” but that “a single bird could also be a fluke accident,” with “no evidence at this point” supporting anything beyond that. The International Union for Conservation of Nature calls the bird critically endangered, and the American Bird Conservancy said its range is restricted to the tropics.
Russell said one way researchers could look for an environmental signal would be to see whether multiple birds showed up in California. She said she previously wrote about five species of booby that are now common off California because of warming temperatures and marine heatwaves, and she said, “If this is a sign of this species moving north, we now have some baseline data when we first detected one.”