In the day and age of drone technology and artificial intelligence, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is still employs a decidedly low tech method to count the nests at the world’s largest albatross colony.
Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge is located on the far northern end of the Hawaiian archipelago and is one of the oldest atoll formations in the world. Situated within the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, Midway Atoll provides nesting habitat for millions of seabirds and is home to truly staggering amount of albatross.
The annual nest count at Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge is conducted by over a dozen USFWS volunteers who carefully walk through the nesting areas carrying two mechanical tally counters and click off every time the spot a laysan albatross nest or a black-footed albatross nest. It takes several weeks of walking in systematic grids (sometimes repeatedly) to manually count all the ground nests.
This years count revealed nearly 620,000 laysan albatross nests and just over 25,000 black-footed albatross nests, representing a 25% increase for laysan albatross nests and a 9% decrease for black-footed albatross nests. These counts typically rise and fall in alternating years (sometimes by large margins) and the exact reason for the pattern established over the 30+ years of counting remains unknown.
