Midway Atoll’s albatross ground count reveals over 600 000 pairs are breeding in the 2025/26 season – but will the volunteers be replaced by drones and temporal image differencing?

The 2025/26 ground count volunteers on Midway Atoll, photograph by USFWS volunteer Dan Rapp

Once more, volunteers have conducted exhaustive ground counts of breeding albatrosses in Midway’s Atoll’s Eastern and Sand Islands.  Results for the 2025/26 season are now in.  Laysan Albatrosses Phoebastria immutabilis numbers were down by 5% from the previous season but were still the fourth highest count for the atoll at 589 623 occupied nests.  “It is not uncommon in a given year for population counts on Midway to increase or decrease by 10 to 25%.”  The Black-footed Albatross P. nigripes count of 28 246 occupied nests is the second highest.

The highest number of Vulnerable Short-tailed Albatrosses P. albatrus ever documented in one year at Midway with a total of eight individuals so far was recorded, including the well-known breeding pair George and Geraldine for their ninth breeding season (watch the video of them mutually allopreening), along with several of their offspring returning as juveniles.

“USFWS staff have confirmed that Wisdom [the world’s oldest-known Laysan Albatross] did not lay an egg this year, though she has been visiting Midway Atoll, including another recent visit.”

Alongside the labour-intensive, and potentially disturbing (requiring the wearing of burrow shoes or “Funny Feet”), annual ground count the drone research project completed its second field season.  “Temporal Image Differencing” by surveying the same areas multiple times allows researchers to compare drone images over time to identify breeding albatrosses from non-breeders, making for more accurate counts of the actual numbers of breeding pairs possible.  Read more about the drone project here with photographs and a video.

Perhaps future albatross counts on Midway will be undertaken only by drones, rather than by a team of volunteers.

You can watch breeding Laysan Albatrosses via a live-streaming camera; access it from here.

Information from the Facebook pages of the Friends of Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge and Pacific Islands: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

John Cooper, Emeritus Information Officer, Agreement on the Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels, 27 January 2026