How does an albatross end up that far away from home? I know they can fly a huge distance but that’s pretty lost isn’t it?!
vagrancy (ie birds straying way beyond their normal range) in birds is pretty complicated because there are a number of factors that can cause it we are certain of but many we speculate about and are still investigating. the most basic requirement is that a bird is a migrant, that is it lives in one area when it breeds and another area outside of breeding, or at the very least wandering large distances is part of its normal behaviour*. sedentary birds dont really feature as vagrants as they stay local all year round.
*an albatross typically takes seven years to mature to breeding age (a bit less in smaller species, a bit longer in bigger species) and for much of that time wanders the southern oceans covering huge distances not 'anchored' to a specific place
the two easiest ones to explain are:
1.
reverse migration - in short, a bird goes the opposite way to what it was supposed to do when it migrates and as most vargrants are juvenile birds, it's their first migration to the non-breeding region and note that many migrant species
don't migrant with the adults, they're literally winging it
- there are many varied and suggested reasons why this actually happens, some we have confidence, others that are conjecture
2.
weather conditions - on a more local level birds get storm driven, so turn up where they shouldn't (eg seabirds turn up inland) but looking wider at vagrant birds, some it seems are shifted outside of their known region and dont re-orientate and 'wander' and are genuinely lost - this would fit the albatross, tho there could be other explanations or a mixture of reasons
as an aside, the one that really cooks my brain is altitude migrants. in britain an Alpine Accentor is a very rare bird but you'd think we shouldn't ever get one. as its name denotes, it is a bird of the alpine regions above the tree line (a mountain bird) so stays local to its area all year round. BUT it does migrate - in the breeding season it lives at high altitude but in the winter lives at lower altitudes.
So it 'migrates' from the bottom to the top of a mountain and back down again. That's it, nothing more. Yet there are about 20 accepted records of alpine accentor in the uk! And i fucking dipped one of the last ones
(dipped means you went to see it but it had buggered off). I can't get my head around that one, cos iirc the records are most (if not all) of adult birds, so what fucking happened while it simply had to go back up the mountain but ended up coming to the uk? Bizarre.
Bird migration is one of the biggest draws into the fascinating world of birds for many birders - i love sitting on a cornish headland watching a sooty shearwater go past and think in three weeks time it will be off the coast of argentina. But that's just a little taste of it, there are volumns of amazing facts, figures and 'are you fucking kidding me' revelations when it comes to bird migration.