She’s 74 — and expecting: Wisdom the albatross astounds once again

Wisdom is thriving in America — Wisdom the albatross, that is. The Laysan albatross is now at least 74 years old, and she recently laid an egg at the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge in the Pacific Ocean. 

It’s quite a feat for the oldest known bird in the wild. Wisdom was first identified and banded in the 1950s, after she laid an egg on the atoll at the northwestern edge of the Hawaiian Archipelago.

“Of the more than 250,000 birds banded since [biologist] Chandler Robbins banded Wisdom in 1956, the next oldest bird we know about currently is just 52 years old,” Jon Plissner, supervisory wildlife biologist at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, tells NPR.

In 1956, Dwight Eisenhower was president and Hawaii was not yet a U.S. state. In the decades since, Wisdom, like other Laysan albatross, or mōlī in Hawaiian, has continued to fly to Midway every year to nest. NPR has followed Wisdom before: she made headlines when she hatched a chick back in 2013, and she was seen brooding in 2018.

Wisdom is resilient. Eggs she and her mate incubated have occasionally gone missing. In 2011, she survived a deadly tsunami. She’s also been able to navigate man-made threats, from fishing gear to plastic debris scattered over the ocean. Part of her species’ Latin name, Phoebastria immutabilis, refers to its unchanging plumage. And for decades, Wisdom’s consistency has been seen as an inspiration.

She’s believed to have flown more than 3 million miles over the open sea — enough distance to fly from the Earth to the moon and back six times. Wisdom likely spends the year flying “in the North Pacific and/or southern Bering Sea, around the Aleutians and perhaps west toward the Kamchatka Peninsula and Japan,” Plissner says.

The large seabirds normally have only one mate in their lifetime. But after Wisdom’s longtime mate, Akeakamai, failed to return to the atoll, she started performing Laysan albatross’s intricate courtship dances with other males.

So, who is this new fella? Might his relationship with Wisdom be an avian equivalent to the current Hollywood trend of older women pairing up with younger men?

“We don’t know her mate’s age, as he was unbanded before this week,” Plissner says. Because of their never-changing plumage, he adds, it’s hard to determine the exact age of an adult Laysan albatross unless they were banded as chicks.

Over the years, Wisdom has likely produced 50 to 60 eggs, and brought as many as 30 chicks to the fledgling stage, Plissner says. She has persisted, even as the risks to her and millions of other seabirds have increased, from predators to habitat changes.

Plissner notes, “The ongoing effects of climate change causing sea level rise, as well as larger and severe storms has resulted in the loss of breeding habitat through inundation.”

But, he adds, “Wisdom has somehow managed to avoid all of the hazards for more than 70 years.”