This about as awkward a landing as I’ve ever seen a bird make, and this albatross must have been really embarrassed in front of that chick! The Northern Royal Albatross (Diomedea sanfordi) is limited in range during the breeding season:

Northern royal albatrosses nest on the Chatham Islands (Forty-fours Island, Big Sister Island, and Little Sister Island), Enderby Island in the Auckland Islands, and at Taiaroa Head on the Otago Peninsula of New Zealand. The Taiaroa Head colony is the only albatross colony found on a human-inhabited mainland in the Southern hemisphere. When they are not breeding, northern royal albatrosses undertake circumpolar flights in the southern oceans, and in particular like the Humboldt Current and the Patagonian Shelf.

The video below is from Tairoa Head, and is from a collaborative Albatross Cam:

You can watch the 24 hour livecam here or here; it’s a partnership between New Zealand’s conservation department and the Cornell Bird Lab; the second link tells you about the collaboration.  Here are some of the YouTube notes:

Flying for the Northern Royal Albatross is mainly effortless, landing can be a little bit harder. #RoyalCam​ chick had a front row seat to a ‘how not to land’ lesson.

Landing is challenging because of the narrow wings of the albatross, which do not generate sufficient lift to fly slowly. Their preference is to take off and land when it’s quite windy, which allows better control at slow speeds while using the angle of the wing and the speed of the wind to control the descent. However, on calmer days, things can get tricky, as is seen here.

Lucky for the somersaulting alby, recovery was quick and only the chick was watching!! Albatrosses are sturdy birds accustomed to periodic mishaps on landing, and true to form, this adult walked away and appeared fine.

Royal Cam is a 24-hour live stream of a Northern Royal Albatross nest during the breeding season at Pukekura/Taiaroa Head on the southeast tip of New Zealand’s South Island.

Reader jj sent a video of an owl and a hawk fighting for a nest. The owl eventually won. jj’s notes:

Perhaps others have sent these links; in case not, here’s a link to a cool video showing a pair of Great Horned Owls displacing Red-tailed Hawks from their nest.  At the end of the time-lapse video, in which one or another of the pair of hawks makes several passes at one or another of the owls, the hawks seems to have won; but not, because now in the newly renamed “Raptor Cam”, there are owl eggs in the nest and a mother owl brooding them.

The live raptor cam. Owl won!  It’s raining now, and the owl is complaining now. But she owns the nest:

RaptorCam notes:

Last year, we all watched live as a pair of Presidio Red-tailed Hawks successfully reared two chicks and the two chicks fledged the nest. This year we have an unexpected plot twist: a pair of Great Horned Owls have been seen visiting the hawks’ nest and look as though they intend to take up residence there.

This is not uncommon – this reflects the interdependence of species and the way animals in the wild often rely on each other for survival. In this case, Great Horned Owls don’t build their own nests; rather, they take over the nests of other raptors. Over the last few weeks, these owls have stopped by at night to inspect the Red-tailed Hawks’ nest while during the day the hawks, unaware of the nightly owl visits, continued to prep the nest for the season. Recently, there was a brief confrontation between the owls and the hawks where it appeared the hawks maintained the nest, but then during the early hours of February 5, the owls laid an egg in the nest, and on February 9, they laid a second egg. The incubation period for these eggs is about 30-37 days, so we should expect the eggs to hatch around the first week of March. Also, the hawks have back-up nests in the park and our wildlife ecologists are monitoring these nests to find out where they end up nesting.

Stay tuned to watch as the drama between the owls and the hawks continues to unfold.

Ducks in the central part of the U.S. migrate (when they do migrate) down the Mississippi Flyway, which is not only an obvious road South, but provides the wetlands and food that migrating ducks need. (Other birds of course also use this route, but for some reason I’m most concerned with ducks.) This map shows the four great flyways that migratory waterfowl use in North America; the one under discussion is in blue:

Reader Amy called my attention to a live Mississippi River flyway cam showing bunches of birds massing before they head south. The YouTube description says this:

The Raptor Resource Project has established a new bird cam on an island in the heart of the Mississippi River’s Driftless area. Located in the Upper Mississippi National Fish and Wildlife Refuge on Lake Onalaska, the Mississippi River Flyway Cam will offer an unparalleled look at migrating birds and river wildlife, including bald eagles, American white pelicans, sandhill cranes, Caspian terns, cormorants, and many species of ducks, gulls, and other waterfowl.

The cam is north of here, as shown in the map below, but the birds that fly south will undoubtedly be accompanied at some point by James and Honey—if they migrate. In the meantime, look at the live FlywayCam below and see what’s doing. I saw ducks earlier today, Amy saw some lovely sandhill cranes, and right now there’s a hawk and a bunch of pelicans. I saw some MALLARDS a few hours ago!