This Plan to Save a Rare Albatross From Extinction Just Might Work | National Geographic

There's a place called the Pyramid Tatara Khoikhoi, yeah, off the Chatham Islands. This one rock basically is the only place in the world where this exceptionally beautiful, extremely rare bird breeds. The entire global population of 5,000 something pairs returns to only this one place to nest. Oh, eggs in one basket, literally! That risks the whole range of things, and one of the biggest threats in the Chathams here is, yeah, impacts of climate change.

If you are seeing mortality at a rate of, say, 10 percent a year, then in a decade or two, you're talking about extinction. The risks were simply getting too high, so their goal was to create a new colony of Chatham albatrosses on the main island of the Chathams. And that sounds easy, but this is some of the most impressive and incredible conservation work I've ever had the privilege to witness.

There's only perhaps three or four days a year where the sea conditions are good enough for you to actually land on that island. They will vomit exorcist style onto any person that tries to grab them. But heat is the number one danger. So, once you put the first albatross chicks in one of those boxes, the clock begins to tick.

Once the birds are off the pyramid and they're on the boat, the journey really begins. They are landed at a river mouth that is quite close to the new colony. We bring the chicks here, noon east every day, with food. We go down and feed them and give them water. Whatever sound system that plays calls, we have to please put after my marker colony.

You can't take the chicks with her too young because they can't survive without their parents. But if you take them at the right age and let them complete their fledging process, they will leave. But they will have imprinted that location in their minds. When it's time for them to breed, they will go back to where they themselves fledged.

You let this play out over a decade or two, and suddenly you have a new breeding colony. So, we would not have seen even the first year's translated chicks returning yet because they're still not quite old enough to breed. But that should be happening any year now. It's sort of just waiting, really, for the birds to come back.

This seabird crisis is probably one of the most pressing conservation concerns of our time. We've lost in the region of 70% of the global seabird population in the last 60 years. You know, hundreds of thousands of albatrosses and cormorants die every year, drowned in gill nets. Our fisheries are literally taking fish out of the seabirds' beaks.

You know, we found introduction of invasive mice, cats, and rats that wreak havoc with seabird eggs and with the chicks. This is an enormous crisis that's going on, almost completely invisible to everyone in the world because seabirds are, by their very nature, not around where we are. The Chatham Islands and the pyramid, and this albatross for me, are a symbol of hope that even though seabirds globally are in dire straits, we mustn't give up, and there are ways to turn things around.

[Music] [Laughter] [Music] You.