Oh yeah, they're mating.
Yep, that's what's happening.
Third guy's trying to get away.
Behind me is one of the most
amazing birds in the world.
It's called the Galapagos albatross.
and albatrosses have one of the largest
wingspans in the world. They have to migrate over
really really long distances but one of
the things that's really uncommon about
them is that they mate for life.
In a moment we'll take a look at what their
mating ritual looks like. It's a long
dance that lasts hours, even days,
but once they meet a partner, once they
have a partner, once they mate with that
partner, they both take care of the egg
equally and they will continue to mate
with that partner every single year for the
rest of their life.
Behind me you can catch a glimpse of a
male and a female albatross.
Because they mate for life, they spend a
lot of time picking the right partner
and they have this really elaborate mating
ritual that involves a lot of pecking and a
lot of kind of weird play with their
beaks. One of the things that you'll
notice about them too is that they
can spend the entire day just kind of
messing around their mate making sure
they're the right one, and sometimes
you'll see three of them together
because two of them are kind of testing
out whether or not they're the best
candidate for another mate, and the other
one is trying to make a decision about
it. The dance could go on for a long, long
time before they make a decision about
who to mate with and eventually the
reason for that commitment is because
each of them spends about 45 minutes on
rotation with their eggs or sometimes 45
days on rotation with their eggs. The
reason for that commitment is because
they'll each spend an equal amount of
time with their egg that they have to
make sure that that egg is going to get
taken care of it won't hatch. Sometimes
you'll find an egg that's been abandoned
because one partner did take care of it, but the other one, something happened to it. Maybe
was too weak and was killed by a
predator, maybe wasn't able to get food,
or maybe just straight-up abandoned the
egg, and so it's really important that
you pick the right albatross to mate
with for life.
So I know you guys are gonna laugh when
you hear the name of this, and believe
me I did the first time that I heard it, but this bird is called the blue-footed booby.
I have no idea why it's called a booby but
you can see the blue feet here, and this
is the most common kind of booby on a
lot of these islands. And blue feet,
actually, I thought they were born with
it, but it turns out that they get the blue feet from what they eat. They eat a
lot of sardines and other kinds of fish
that give them a blue pigment in their
feet. They don't really have it until
they're about three years old. There's
other birds called red footed
boobies that have red feet because they
primarily eat squid and other kinds of mollusks that gives them a red color in their feet. Both birds,
even though they just have feet
differences from their diet, have
actually got completely different
adaptations. This one has basically made
a nest out of its own poop on the ground,
whereas the red footed boobies, they tend
a nest in trees.
