How to Identify Black-footed Albatross Feathers

What Black-footed Albatross Feathers Look Like

This is a large open-ocean seabird, and its feathers are correspondingly huge. Body feathers are dark sooty brown to blackish-brown overall, dense and slightly oily-feeling (a natural waterproofing trait of pelagic seabirds), 5-9 cm on the body. Older adults often show whitish feathering around the base of the bill and under the eye, so a dark brown feather with a patch of white at one edge can indicate the face region of an older bird; younger birds are uniformly dark with little to no white. Some adults also develop white on the undertail coverts as they age, giving a sprinkling of white feathers even on an otherwise all-dark bird.

Flight feathers are the standout structural feature: primaries can reach 28-35 cm, extremely long, narrow, and stiff, built for dynamic soaring over open ocean, dark brown to blackish with a slightly paler brown tone on the underside in some feathers. The shafts are thick and pale, reflecting the mechanical stress of a wingspan that reaches over 2 meters. Down feathers, if found near colonies, are soft and pale grey, quite different from the dark contour feathers of adults.

Step-by-Step: Is This Feather From a Black-footed Albatross?

• Check for extreme flight-feather length. Anything approaching 30 cm, narrow and stiff, immediately suggests a large pelagic seabird like an albatross rather than a gull or shearwater.
• Confirm overall dark brown-black coloring. Nearly the entire bird is dark, so a uniformly blackish-brown feather fits well, especially body and covert feathers.
• Look for white at the face or vent. A feather with white restricted to one end, or found alongside dark feathers near a white patch, suggests an older adult's facial or undertail area.
• Feel the texture. A slightly oily, dense, waterproof feel supports a true pelagic seabird rather than a coastal gull.
• Rule out similarly sized dark seabirds. Cormorants and dark-morph gulls are dark too, but their flight feathers are shorter and broader relative to length than an albatross's needle-long primaries.

Similar Species & How to Tell Them Apart

The Laysan Albatross, which often nests alongside this species, is mostly white-bodied with dark upperwings, making it easy to separate — a mostly dark feather is far more likely Black-footed than Laysan. Sooty Shearwater is also uniformly dark brown, but its flight feathers are noticeably shorter and its body feathers smaller, reflecting its much smaller overall body size. Short-tailed Albatross, a rarer North Pacific relative, has adults with much more white in the body plumage and a pink-based bill area, and juveniles that resemble Black-footed but tend to show a slightly warmer, more chocolate-brown tone rather than sooty blackish-brown.

Where & When You'll Find Them

Black-footed Albatrosses breed on remote islands in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands and a few other Pacific islets, then range enormously across the North Pacific to forage, regularly following fishing boats far from land. Onshore, feathers are almost always found near breeding colonies on sandy or scrubby islands, especially near nest scrapes and preening areas, since these birds otherwise spend nearly all their time far out at sea. Molt is protracted and not tightly seasonal, but the heaviest feather drop near colonies happens during the breeding season from winter through spring when adults are ashore for extended periods incubating and feeding chicks.