Scott Shaffer, UC Santa Cruz Long Marine Lab, CA -- There's excitment in the air, hormones are raging, lots of singing and dancing, and well..... albatrosses are doing what comes naturally at this time of year. They're breeding.

Late last November, adults began returning to the breeding colonies on remote Tern and Midway islands. After 4-5 months apart, mates began renewing the bonds they've made over years or tens of years. Experienced breeders know what to do and begin early, while less experienced birds typically take a bit longer to get going.

The birds laid their eggs in late November to early December; incubation lasts around 60 days. So, now, as chicks are starting to hatch out, adults are making short trips to feed the chick, a schedule that lasts for the next 5-6 months. The chicks that make it to 'graduation day' -- i.e. fledging -- will leave the beaches in June and July.

Our last blog featured albatross fledglings from Midway Atoll that we tracked from July 2007 to November 2007, when the last tag sent its last signal. The birds that survived are well on their way to learning how to be an adult. They probably won't visit the breeding colonies for a few more years. But eventually, they will experience the allure of breeding.

As we begin this breeding season, we're excited about the satellite tags we'll soon be putting on the birds. We're using tags that report near real-time data as before, but we will also be field-testing new archival tags. New algorithms have been incorporated into the archival tags (from Lotek Wireless, see photo at bottom) that we hope will improve the quality of our tracking. (Archival tags don't send data about where the birds fly to a satellite, like the satellite and GPS tags; they just collect and store it until we retrieve the tag from the birds and download the data onto a computer.) There's only one way to find out, and that's to try the new tags out on birds equipped with more precise tags.

So, we'll be putting the archival tags on birds along with a satellite tag (that has an average error of 2-3 km or .6 to 1.8 miles) or a GPS tag (that has an average error of 10 meters or about 30 feet). In addition, we'll be using more GPS tags. These tags provide incredible resolution with a location every 10 seconds to 10 minutes at a resolution of 10 meters (30 feet). This means that we'll be able see what the birds are doing every few minutes, instead of once or twice a day.

We'll be deploying tags at Tern Island from now until late March. We're also collaborating with folks from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to study adult albatrosses from Midway Atoll. This work is being done with archival tags. We'll also be deploying archival tags at Guadalupe Island in February and we hope, archival tags on black-footed albatrosses in May on Torishima Island, Japan. All told, we'll have an exciting new view of how different albatross populations 'carve up' their feeding territories in the North Pacific.