Waved albatross sighted off California, thousands of miles from home

A rare waved albatross was spotted off Point Piedras Blancas, Calif., on Jan. 23 by Tammy Russell, a marine ornithologist aboard the research vessel Reuben Lasker. The bird appeared shortly after noon, wheeling low over the Pacific as dolphins and humpback whales breached. "I yelled, 'waved albatross' and got out my phone to take a video, which turned out horribly because I was tripping over everything in utter shock at what I had just seen," Dr.

Russell said. Its yellow bill, dark eyes, long wings and unhurried flight were unmistakable. The sighting occurred about 23 miles southwest of Piedras Blancas, roughly 90 miles south of Monterey, and the bird had traveled about 3,300 miles, as the crow flies, from its typical range in the Galápagos Islands, prompting ornithologists to label it a vagrant.

"Nobody's ever seen a waved albatross off anywhere north of Costa Rica previously," said Marshall Iliff of eBird at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The waved albatross, also known as the Galápagos albatross, is listed as "critically endangered" by the American Bird Conservancy. Fewer than 70,000 remain, and their numbers are declining, the conservancy says, threatened by fisheries, plastic pollution and changing climate that alters the locations of squid and fish they feed on.

The species is the largest in the Galápagos and is named for a faint, wavelike pattern across its brown body. Dr.

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