Buller's Albatross | Thalassarche bulleri

Voice

At sea it is all but silent; only squabbles over food behind a boat bring a harsh, rasping croak. At the colony courtship runs to a series of brays, croaks and wails broken by bill clatter, while the partners face each other and work their heads up and down.

Identification

About 80 cm long and 2.5 to 3.5 kg, a good thirty centimetres shorter than the great albatrosses. The bill is black with a broad golden-yellow plate along the upper ridge, turning more orange towards the tip, and a second yellow plate along the bottom — yellow above and below together is the mark. The forehead is silvery grey, the neck and throat light grey, with a dark patch around the eye and a white crescent behind it. The upperwing is black, the lower back and rump white, the tail dark with a black tip. The underwing is white with a sharply cut, broad black leading edge and a narrow black trailing edge. Birds of the northern population have a greyer forehead and a little more black on the sides of the bill than southern ones.

Confusion species

Grey-headed Albatross (Thalassarche chrysostoma) is the hardest: it has a darker, evenly slate-grey head with no pale forehead, and the yellow on the bill is a narrow ridge above and below rather than broad plates; the black leading edge of its underwing is also broader and far more diffuse. Shy Albatross (Thalassarche cauta), Salvin's Albatross (Thalassarche salvini) and Chatham Albatross (Thalassarche eremita) all show a much narrower black leading edge on the underwing plus a small dark thumbprint where the wing meets the body, and a bill that is grey-green, horn or wholly bright yellow — never black with two yellow plates. Black-browed Albatross (Thalassarche melanophris) has a white head with a dark brow and an orange-yellow bill with a red tip. The two yellow-nosed albatrosses (Thalassarche chlororhynchos and Thalassarche carteri) are slimmer, with an almost white head and a thin yellow ridge on the top of the bill only. The great albatrosses of the genus Diomedea can be ruled out at once: far larger, pink-billed, and with an upperwing that whitens with age.

Habitat

The shelf edge and the subtropical convergence, where cold and warm water meet; it takes much squid and fish and readily follows fishing vessels. Breeding is in loose colonies on rock ledges, bare slopes and under low scrub on remote islands.

Range and movements

Endemic as a breeder to New Zealand. The southern population breeds on the Snares Islands and Solander Island; the northern on the Sisters and the Forty-Fours in the Chathams and on Rosemary Rock in the Three Kings. Adults forage between 40 and 50 degrees south, from Tasmania to the Chatham Rise. At sea it can be met across the cooler half of the map window, and it is one of the most regular mollymawks on pelagic trips off New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania, mainly in autumn and winter.

• Resident
• Winter
• dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

Where and when to look

On a pelagic out of Wollongong or Eaglehawk Neck this is one of the standard mollymawks from March onwards. Send your eye straight to the bill: yellow on top and yellow below, with black between, is Buller's and nothing else. If the bill will not show, go to the underwing — a broad black leading edge with a knife-straight inner border belongs to this species, whereas Shy and Salvin's have a thin edge with a dark thumbprint there instead.

Conservation

Near Threatened (NT). The species was listed as Vulnerable until 2008 and was downlisted when better counts showed a higher population: now around 64,000 birds. It remains a species with a small breeding range — a handful of islands and rock stacks — so an introduced rat or cat on one island could do great harm. Mortality in New Zealand fisheries is the main direct problem: birds are struck by trawl warps or hooked on demersal longlines.

Scientific name

Thalassarche bulleri | (Rothschild, 1893)

Rothschild described the species in 1893 as Diomedea bulleri; because it now sits in Thalassarche, author and year go in parentheses. The epithet honours Sir Walter Lawry Buller (1838–1906), the New Zealand lawyer and ornithologist who wrote A History of the Birds of New Zealand. The type locality is given simply as New Zealand. The genus Thalassarche was introduced by Reichenbach in 1853 and means, from the Greek thalassa and archē, something like 'ruler of the sea'.