The first royal albatross chicks of the season have left Taiaroa Head near Dunedin, the only mainland site in the world where the giant seabirds breed, and rangers are hoping this year’s crop can match last season’s record.
The Department of Conservation confirmed on 8 September that the first chicks fledged in the previous week and over the weekend. Among them was Āwheo, the chick that has grown up in front of a worldwide audience on the 24-hour Royal Cam livestream. DOC said Āwheo had also flown, possibly making use of the strong winds that have been buffeting the headland.
Last season 38 chicks fledged from the colony, the most on record, and DOC biodiversity ranger Sharyn Broni said she hoped to see that number equalled.
“We’ve had so many milestones recently, with last year’s record fledgling season and then the 1000th chick hatching,” Sharyn Broni said.
“Now, we’re at this exciting time of year when the chicks start to leave as all the hard work the rangers have done pays off. We’ve seen the chicks starting to practice in the strong winds, flapping and strengthening their wings getting ready for their long journeys,” she said.
The birds are northern royal albatross, known to Māori as toroa, and they are among the largest seabirds on Earth, with wingspans of up to three metres. Āwheo hatched on 22 January, according to DOC’s Royal Cam page, which means the chick spent a little over seven months on the headland. DOC’s guide to the livestream says chicks leave at an average age of 240 days, anywhere between 219 and 256 days. The oldest usually go first, but chicks nesting on exposed spots with good take-off winds sometimes beat older birds out to sea.
Broni said the adults had earned a break. “These chicks are huge and, understandably, their parents are exhausted from 7 months of feeding them!” she said.
The parents now head out across the Pacific, where RNZ reported they will spend the next 12 months building up reserves for another breeding season. Great albatrosses such as royals breed only every second year, DOC says, because raising a single chick uses up everything both parents have.
The young birds face a far longer trip. According to RNZ, the juveniles first learn to feed off New Zealand’s east coast, then cross about 9000 kilometres of the Pacific to the Humboldt Current off Chile. DOC says they then stay at sea for four to 10 years before returning to the headland.
Last year’s Royal Cam chick shows how quickly they get going. Kaewa left the colony on 17 September 2025, and by mid-October DOC reported that her tracker showed she had already flown more than 2800 kilometres across the Pacific. Eighteen of last season’s 38 fledglings carried GPS trackers, and that record haul beat the previous best of 33, which had been set in each of the two seasons before.
The colony’s growth is one of New Zealand’s quieter conservation successes. DOC dates it to a single breeding pair in the late 1930s (its releases give both 1937 and 1938), and by 2025 there were more than 80 breeding pairs. About half of the headland’s roughly 200 royal albatross come ashore in any year to court or nest, according to DOC’s Taiaroa Head nature reserve page.
In January the colony hatched its 1000th chick. At the time Broni explained how sharply the pace had picked up.
“Interestingly, when the colony first started with one breeding pair in 1938 through until 2007, 500 chicks hatched. It’s only taken us under 20 years to double that number, so we are getting better at it,” Sharyn Broni said in DOC’s 27 January release.
Put another way, the first 500 chicks took close to 70 years and the second 500 took about 19.
The care behind those numbers is intensive and hands-on. Rangers take each egg as it begins to hatch and finish incubating it themselves, while the parent sits on a dummy egg. Newly hatched chicks are weighed, sprayed against fly strike and returned to the nest as quickly as possible. The nesting area is a sheltered hot spot where summer ground temperatures can reach 50 degrees, so a sprinkler system cools nests on hot days, and chicks that fall too far behind are hand-fed a blended fish smoothie.
Even so, the Otago birds are a small share of the species. DOC said last October that about 99 percent of northern royal albatross breed on small islands in the Chatham Islands. A storm there in 1985 destroyed nesting habitat and, according to DOC’s species page, cut the share of nests producing fledglings to as low as 3 percent in some years. The world population is estimated at about 17,000 mature birds, and the species is classed as nationally vulnerable. The birds face threats from changing habitat and climate, plastic pollution and some fishing practices, and they breed slowly, starting at about eight years old and usually raising one chick every two years.
They can also live a very long time. One Taiaroa Head bird known as Grandma raised her last chick at the age of 62.
The colony is co-managed by Te Poari a Pukekura, a trust bringing together Te Rūnanga o Ōtākou, the Korako Karetai Trust, Dunedin City Council and DOC, with support from the Otago Peninsula Trust. Its chair, Bill Karaitiana, described the departing chicks as extra eyes over the ocean, and said “The toroa can help us better understand the mauri (life force) of its ecosystem.”
Royal Cam, run by DOC with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in New York, is now in its tenth year and draws millions of views a year. With Āwheo gone, the rest of this season’s chicks will keep leaving over the coming weeks, and next season’s adults begin arriving home in October after a year at sea.
Have you seen the albatross at Taiaroa Head, or followed a chick on Royal Cam? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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