Clash of the Feathered Titans | Hakai Magazine
In the middle of the night, an albatross rests on its single, precious egg. But the great bird is disturbed by the approach of webbed feet padding in the darkness. The albatross stands to defend its egg, bill snapping. Its foe, a burly male southern giant petrel, isn’t there for the egg. With a lunge, the petrel bites the albatross around the neck, dragging it off into the bushes.
This feathered violence is new to science. On Gough Island—a lonely rock in the middle of the South Atlantic—researchers have recently discovered southern giant petrels, which usually feed on fish, krill, and young birds, hunting and killing massive adult albatrosses.
Gough Island is one of the few breeding sites of the Atlantic yellow-nosed albatross, an endangered species that has been under the careful watch of rotating sets of researchers since 2008. The first evidence of the attacks emerged in October 2017, when researchers found the carcasses of 19 adult albatrosses.
At first, they thought the deaths might have been a freak accident; that the albatrosses had crash-landed during a windstorm, says Michelle Risi, a wildlife ecologist with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in the United Kingdom. But when she and her colleagues had their turn on the island in 2018, it became clear that the deaths were no fluke.
