Nearly extinct albatross fed on Vancouver Island for 4,200 years: study
The short-tailed albatross were creatures of habit, according to a new study that found they returned to Vancouver Island to feed for generations over a 4,200-year period before being driven to the precipice of extinction by feather hunters.
The evidence may be the key to helping the birds back from extinction, said the study's lead author, Eric Guiry, a lecturer at the University of Leicester in England.
The birds' potential ranges span thousands of kilometres along the Pacific coastline and across oceans, but Guiry said the animals still preferred certain hunting and feeding grounds.
“This kind of feeding behaviour has only recently been discovered in birds today,” he said. “But we've got evidence of it happening over thousands of years. The same birds go into the same area for their entire lives.”
Researchers analyzed these foraging patterns using chemical fingerprints, or isotopic compositions, preserved in the bones of albatross that were found through archeological digs and museum samples, said the study published this month in the open-access journal Communications Biology.
One of the sites where researchers collected ancient bone samples, a Mowachaht Nuu-chahnulth village on Nootka Island off Vancouver Island's west coast, dated as far back as 2300 BC. The study compared samples found on Vancouver Island with those in the United States, Russia and Japan.
Scientists were able to connect dots with the chemical fingerprints to piece together the puzzle of the migration and feeding pattern of the short-tailed albatross over 4,250 years, Guiry said.
By mapping the biological markers against known isotopic baselines across the species' foraging range, the researchers were able to build a picture of the birds' migratory and foraging behaviour over hundreds of generations, he said. The short-tailed albatross was almost wiped out for its feathers between the 1880s and 1930s, leaving no functioning breeding colonies in the North Pacific, from Japan to Russia, Vancouver Island south to California, the study said.
Known for their pink bills, the wingspan of the albatross can exceed two metres. Once numbering in the millions, the seabirds are regaining in population, but they remain at less than one per cent of their pre-collapse levels.
The Canadian Press