“There on a grassy path, before my astonished gaze, sat a male albatross incubating a large white egg.”
With these words of wonder, Lance Richdale, a science adviser to Otago schools, recorded his first encounter in November 1936 with the royal albatrosses at the tip of Otago Peninsula. The sight was remarkable then and remains so: giant seabirds tending a giant egg comparable in proportion and weight to a pack of butter. Back then, the colony consisted of two or three nests scattered across the tussocky headland. For Richdale, it would be the focus of his research and protection spanning three decades, long enough for him to become a world authority on albatrosses thanks to the colony’s accessibility. It remains the world’s only albatross colony located on a mainland at the edge of a city.
Soon after his first visit, Richdale realised the albatrosses of Taiaroa Head/Pukekura were very slow breeders – one egg every two years – and to make reproductive matters worse, people had a habit of disrupting their nesting. Between the two world wars, eggs were stolen from nests for eating or, at least twice, for adding to Otago Museum’s bird collections. Youths were sometimes observed throwing rocks at nesting birds.
These stories of abuse enraged Richdale. During school holidays and at weekends, he guarded the colony with the support of staff at the shipping signal station and lighthouse keepers. He also instigated a fence to deter vandals. Eventually, the headland would become an iconic Department of Conservation nature reserve with permits required for entry. In the 90-odd years of intensive management, albatross numbers have increased slowly with no record of eggs going missing – until November last year, that is. Overnight on November 10, to the utter dismay of the rangers, four nests were raided and four eggs removed – 10% of the season’s anticipated egg count. The raiders left no trace.
It seems the robbers knew the layout of nests, taking the eggs from a group of four nests that were out of camera range. Possibly they reached the narrow headland by boat and then scaled the cliffs near the harbour entrance.
“Unbelievable” is how Annie Wallace, then operations manager for DoC in Dunedin, described the violation. The eggs were newly laid, and once blown, might fetch a pretty price on the illegal international market in rare wildlife artefacts, a trade worth billions of dollars annually.
Northern royal albatrosses, breeding in the Chatham Islands and, on a much smaller scale, at Otago Peninsula, present images of breathtaking grace and endurance. They knew the world was a sphere long before humans, their navigation guided by the Earth’s geomagnetic field.
Every second year, the breeding adults circle the southern ocean in an easterly direction on a year-long migration to intrinsically known feeding grounds. They do not need land. The sea is their tuckshop, waterbed and watering hole.
When the removal of the four eggs was discovered by rangers, DoC immediately notified police, mana whenua and the albatross visitor centre. Airport border security staff were alerted. Careful scrutiny of video footage from an array of surveillance cameras on the headland produced no leads.
At the time of writing, DoC staff were reviewing security measures ahead of this year’s breeding season. Portable trail cameras, commonly used by DOC in sensitive areas, might be among the measures. Meanwhile, the case is not closed.
An admirer of Richdale’s research, New York-based ornithologist Robert Cushman Murphy, who visited Taiaroa Head in 1948, was so moved when he first saw albatrosses in flight in the South Atlantic subantarctic region he wrote: “I now belong to a higher cult of mortals for I have seen the albatross!”
Neville Peat is a Dunedin writer on nature and environmental topics, including the biography of Lance Richdale, Seabird Genius (Otago University Press, 2011).
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