She’s the grand old lady of albatrosses, is still raising chicks and doesn’t look a day older than she did in 1956.
Researchers call her Wisdom, and at 60 years of age she was recently found sitting on an egg on Midway Atoll, an island in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii.
In fact, researchers didn’t recognise her as the old grey dame of the isle at first, because she just didn’t look the part. Not a trace of grey in the feathers, and no tiredness around the eyes.
“That is part of the amazing thing about this,” said Bruce Peterjohn, chief of the US Geological Survey’s Patuxent Wildlife Research Centre.
“Fifty-five years after she was initially banded, she looks the same. Here is a bird that is a minimum 60 years old and basically hasn’t changed and can go very readily and raise and produce young,” he said.
Most albatrosses on islands in the northwest Hawaiian chain seem to live 30-40 years.
“Based on the banding data we have, she seems to be a fairly exceptional age,” he said. “This is well beyond the average lifespan of an albatross.” That means she has probably outlived at least a couple of mates, though researchers cannot say for sure because they have no way to track her partners over time.
He said researchers have known about the long-lived white bird since 2002, when they went back to their records after re-banding her and found that she had been first tagged by researcher Chandler Robbins in 1956.