Royal Albatross Nest - Taiaroa Head, New Zealand

Welcome to RoyalCam, a live camera watching a northern royal albatross nest on the clifftop at Pukekura, also called Taiaroa Head, at the tip of the Otago Peninsula near Dunedin in New Zealand. The birds nest in the tussock grass on an exposed headland above the entrance to Otago Harbour, and the camera sits close enough to follow a single pair through a whole breeding season. Known as toroa in Māori, these are among the largest flying birds on Earth, with a wingspan of more than three metres.

This is the only mainland breeding colony of albatross anywhere in the southern hemisphere. Every other royal albatross colony is on a remote island, and almost all of the rest of this species nests on the Chatham Islands, a thousand kilometres east. Expect long, still stretches. An albatross on the nest may sit for days, and much of the drama is in the changeover when a partner returns from the sea. New Zealand is twelve hours ahead of UTC, thirteen in summer, so the daylight hours here fall during the European and American night. The nest is empty for part of the year between breeding seasons.

The colony began on its own. The first egg was found on the headland in 1919, but nothing survived until the Dunedin ornithologist Lance Richdale camped out to guard a nest and saw the first chick fly in 1938. Everything here descends from that work. The site is now a nature reserve run by the Department of Conservation, which set up this camera in 2016 and has run it with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology since 2019.

Did You Know? A young royal albatross that leaves this headland will not touch land again for years. Fledglings fly out over the Southern Ocean and stay at sea continuously, feeding and sleeping on the wing, sometimes for as long as a decade before returning to the same clifftop to find a mate. The first thing they do on coming home is look for the place they were born.

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