One of my tasks recently has been to find dead albatross chicks and remove the bands that we just installed. The paper trail behind the newly installed bands will be more useful if the dead bands are shown. On Saturday I took a band off a dead adult Black-footed Albatross (BFAL) that I found during this task. This afternoon I was completing the paperwork and discovered that the dead BFAL I found had been banded here at Tern Island on June 5, 1990. The bird was 18 years old and a couple of months. That is far from a record age but it is still pretty amazing! These birds travel many thousands of miles searching for food each time they raise a chick, so that band may have traveled 300,000 or 400,000 miles across the north Pacific on the leg of an albatross! These are not exaggerated numbers. It could have traveled considerably farther. (The picture is not the same bird I found dead. It shows an adult BFAL and its chick just to illustrate the kind of bird I'm talking about.)
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