Indian Yellow-nosed Albatross | Thalassarche carteri

Voice

At sea it is all but mute; only in a scrum over offal does it give a thin, nasal rasp. On the breeding islands the display repertoire runs to hoarse moaning, high wailing notes and dry clattering as partners tap their bills together. Within this guide's window, where at most one or two pairs breed, that is virtually never heard.

Identification

Seventy-five centimetres and some two and a half kilos, strikingly fine-built for an albatross, with narrow wings and a light, buoyant flight. The head is largely white with at most a pale grey wash on the cheek, a small dark triangle just in front of and below the eye and a white crescent behind it. The bill is long, slender and black, with a narrow yellow ridge along the top that turns pink to cherry-red towards the hook; the yellow stripe tapers to a sharp point at its base. Mantle, upperwing and tail are dark grey, the underparts white, and the underwing white with a narrow black margin — far narrower than in the Black-browed Albatross. Young birds have a wholly black bill and a white head, and are then practically inseparable from young Atlantic Yellow-nosed Albatrosses.

Confusion species

Atlantic Yellow-nosed Albatross (Thalassarche chlororhynchos) is the real trap, as both are the same size and equally slim. The Atlantic bird has a distinctly greyer head and a larger dark triangle in front of the eye, while this species is mainly white-headed; and the yellow stripe at the bill base is broad and round-ended in the Atlantic, sharply pointed in the Indian. In honesty this needs a bird passing close in good light — at range, and certainly with young birds showing an all-black bill, the two cannot be named with certainty. Buller's Albatross (T. bulleri) has yellow along the lower edge of the bill as well, and a grey face with a white forehead cap. Grey-headed Albatross (T. chrysostoma) has an evenly grey head, yellow above and below on the bill and a broad black leading edge to the underwing. Black-browed Albatross (T. melanophris) is heavier, with an orange-yellow bill and broad black underwing margins. Shy Albatross (T. cauta), Salvin's Albatross (T. salvini) and Chatham Albatross (T. eremita) are all much larger and broader-winged. The great albatrosses (Diomedea exulans, D. epomophora) and the sooty albatrosses (Phoebetria palpebrata, P. fusca) do not come into it.

Habitat

Open ocean and the shelf break in subtropical to cool temperate water, where it picks fish, squid and crustaceans from the surface and comes in behind fishing vessels for offal. It ranges further from the colonies than most mollymawks and only rarely enters shallow inshore water. Breeding is on grassy slopes and cliffs of subtropical and subantarctic islands in the Indian Ocean.

Range and movements

The colonies lie outside this guide's window, on Amsterdam and Saint-Paul, the Crozets, Kerguelen and the Prince Edward Islands; inside the window only one or two pairs have bred on The Pyramid in the Chathams since 1998. Outside the breeding season it spreads east to the waters off Western Australia, the Great Australian Bight and south-eastern Australia, and on into the Tasman Sea. In New Zealand it is a scarce visitor, chiefly in winter off the north-east coast and in the Bay of Plenty. The difference in numbers speaks for itself: many thousands of records from Australia, a few dozen from New Zealand.

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

Where and when to look

A winter pelagic out of Wollongong, Sydney, Port Fairy or Perth is the best chance; it often comes early to the burley and stands out among the bulkier Black-browed Albatrosses by its narrow wings and buoyant flight. Go straight to the bill: all black with one thin yellow line on top means a yellow-nosed albatross, and then head colour — white or clearly grey — decides which of the two. Photograph such a bird if you can, because the shape of the yellow base is easier to judge on an image than through binoculars.

Conservation

Endangered (EN), after a steep decline over the past seventy years. Longline bycatch is the leading cause at sea; on Amsterdam Island, the core colony, outbreaks of avian cholera and Erysipelothrix rhusiopathiae have wiped out whole cohorts of chicks. Because the species barely breeds inside this guide's window, its fate here depends entirely on what happens in the Indian Ocean and on how the fleets off Australia handle their hooks.

Scientific name

Thalassarche carteri | (Rothschild, 1903)

Rothschild described the bird in 1903 as Thalassogeron carteri, in the Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club, with Point Cloates on the north-west coast of Western Australia as type locality; author and year therefore stand in parentheses. The epithet honours Thomas Carter, the English naturalist and pastoralist who collected birds along that coast for years. Until the end of the twentieth century it was treated together with the Atlantic Yellow-nosed Albatross (T. chlororhynchos) as one species; since then the two have been kept apart.