Storm-battered albatrosses recovering at Palmerston North’s Wildbase Hospital as climate-driven seabird rescues rise

An albatross blown off course by last week’s ferocious lower North Island storm has been released back into the open ocean off Napier, and two more seabirds caught up in the same weather system are still in care at Massey University’s Wildbase Hospital in Palmerston North — part of a steadily growing caseload that staff say tracks the increasing frequency and severity of storms hitting the New Zealand coastline.

Four injured and weakened albatrosses were rushed to the hospital last week after the storm scattered exhausted seabirds along the lower North Island shore. One arrived with a broken pelvis and had to be euthanised. The remaining three are now being nursed back to flight fitness on a regimen of whole salmon smolt and supervised swims in a 3.5 metre indoor pool.

Wildbase manager and Massey University associate professor Megan Jolly told RNZ the indoor pool was central to the recovery process for large seabirds that should be living their lives at sea, not on land.

“The advantage of the pool is it’s inside, so if they’re a little bit weak, we can control the air temperature,” Jolly said. “More importantly, it doesn’t give him the option of getting off the pool — it’s got high sides. When they’re weak and inherently lazy, they’ll get out and sit on the side.”

One of the patients in the pool when RNZ visited was a juvenile albatross picked up on the Taranaki coast and known to staff simply as Pātea, after the South Taranaki town near where he was found. Wildbase does not give its rescued birds cute names, instead referring to them by location, a small detail that reflects the hospital’s clinical focus on returning wild animals to the wild rather than turning them into mascots.

Pātea is being treated for a suspected soft-tissue injury and, when he is not in the water, sits in a quiet room on padding and towels designed to protect his delicate feet, which are built for the ocean and bruise easily on hard surfaces.

“He’s preening now, so he’s just cruising around on the water, fluffing his feathers up, and that’s the best thing he can do,” Jolly told RNZ. “Part of the problem with the storm is that he gets a bit roughed up and it can disrupt those feathers. It’s the structure of the feathers and them being perfect that makes him waterproof.”

Without those waterproofed feathers an albatross cannot feed properly at sea, which is why even relatively minor injuries can spiral into life-threatening exhaustion and starvation if the bird is not picked up in time.

Wildbase staff say the timing of this latest influx is unusual. The hospital normally sees most of its rescued seabirds in the depths of winter, when southern storms drive exhausted birds onto the coast. This year the work began in February, when wild weather forced a large royal albatross into care, and it has not really stopped since.

“With climate change, and the increase in frequency and severity of storms, we are seeing a lot more seabirds dumped on New Zealand’s shores,” Jolly said. “These guys were all thin and a bit weak, when the storm got to them.”

She said anyone who came across an injured seabird should call a local bird rescue group or the Department of Conservation rather than attempt a hands-on rescue alone. Small birds could be carefully wrapped in a towel, but that approach was a bad idea with larger seabirds. Wandering albatrosses can have wing spans of more than three metres and beaks sharp enough to inflict serious wounds.

The pattern of arrivals tends to be predictable, even if the weather causing it is not. “There’s always a discussion in our group text of, when a big storm comes through, everyone picks when they think the seabirds will start to arrive,” Jolly said. “It’s usually about three days after a storm. We see that delay, because people aren’t out in the storm, when it’s happening. It takes maybe a day for the storm to clear, people to be out there and then they find these birds.”

The Napier release on Thursday was the second piece of good news in as many days. Before being flown north, that albatross spent an hour on public show at the Central Energy Trust Wildbase Recovery Centre in Palmerston North’s Esplanade gardens, giving locals a rare close-up look at a bird most New Zealanders only ever see as a distant silhouette over deep water.

Recovery centre manager Chris Smith said the brief appearance had drawn a steady stream of visitors. “It’s actually just out here for an hour for the public to get a chance to pop in and see something that’s pretty unusual,” he said. “It’s not here for a long time, because they don’t do well in this environment, but it’s just here for a really unique chance for people to see it.”

The Wildbase Recovery Centre opened in 2019 and now attracts roughly 80,000 visitors a year, with most drawn by long-stay patients such as the royal albatross still in care from February’s storm. The model is unusual in New Zealand. The recovery centre is run as a public-facing arm of the Massey University veterinary hospital, letting people see the work without disturbing patients in the active treatment wards.

Pātea’s stay in the indoor pool is expected to last only a few more days. “Still being onshore in New Zealand is not where he’s supposed to be,” Jolly said. “He’s supposed to have fledged from his nest and gone out over the Pacific Ocean, and disappeared for a couple of years, then come back as perfectly coloured adult.”

He and the other Wairarapa bird are expected to be released in the coming days. On Thursday a fresh patient arrived in his place — another albatross, suffering damage to its feet and dehydration, almost certainly another casualty of the same storm system that started this fortnight’s rush.

Have you ever come across a stranded seabird, or visited the Wildbase Recovery Centre in Palmerston North? Tell us about it in the comments below.