The Status of Steller’s Albatross 
Oliver L. Austin, Jr . 1 
The Short-tailed Albatross or Steller’s Al- 
batross, Diomedea alhatrus, the largest and hand- 
somest of the three North Pacific albatrosses, 
was abundant at the turn of the present cen- 
tury, but has become so rare during the past 
two decades that it may soon be extinct, if it 
is not already so. Because it seems unlikely 
that we will ever learn more about it at first 
hand, this paper attempts to clarify our knowl- 
edge of the species by examining and evalu- 
ating all the known written record. For a bird 
that so recently was relatively common, accurate 
data are remarkably scarce in literature. Much 
of the most pertinent and illuminating infor- 
mation about it is written in Japanese. As these 
writings have never before been translated or 
summarized, the data they contain have hereto- 
fore been unavailable to western scientists. 
Steller’s Albatross was discovered by the 
famous German naturalist whose name it bears, 
during his travels with Commander Bering in 
Kamchatka and the Bering Sea in the 1740’s. It 
was described and named in 1780 by P. S. Pallas, 
in his Spicilegia Zoologica, from a specimen 
taken off Kamchatka. Since then ornithologists, 
other than the Japanese, have been able to do 
little more than describe the physical features 
of the scanty specimen material available — most 
of it taken at sea during the non-breeding sea- 
son— and to delineate its former habitat from 
the data on the labels of these specimens, and 
from bones found in prehistoric shell-heaps and 
kitchen middens in Oregon and California. Dur- 
1 Head, Wildlife Branch, Natural Resources Sec- 
tion, General Headquarters, Supreme Commander for 
the Allied Powers. Published with permission of Lt. 
Col. H. G. Schenck, Chief, Natural Resources Sec- 
tion. Abstract read at Pacific Science Congress, Auck- 
land, N. Z., February 21, 1949. Manuscript received 
March 23, 1949. 
ing the non-breeding season the species appar- 
ently ranged widely over the North Pacific, from 
the China coast northward to Kamchatka and 
the Bering Sea (northernmost record, Norton 
Sound, Alaska), and down the Pacific coast of 
North America to lower California. 
We now know, as will be shown in detail 
later, that the breeding range of Steller’s Al- 
batross was limited to isolated oceanic islets 
south of Japan. It bred, definitely, in the 
southern Izus, northern Bonins, and southern 
Ryukyus, and perhaps, though confirmatory 
specimen evidence is lacking, in the Pescadores 
and Daito Islands as well. All western accounts 
to date, however, list the species as breeding 
only in the Bonins and, erroneously, on Wake 
Island. 
The inclusion of Wake in the breeding range 
of the species is apparently based on the writ- 
ings of Titian R. Peale, who visited Wake in 
1841 as naturalist on the United States exploring 
expeditions which cruised Pacific and Antarctic 
waters from 1838 to 1842 under Lt. Charles L. 
Wilkes. Peale quarreled with Wilkes shortly 
after the expedition’s return and the latter ac- 
cordingly refused to allow him to publish his 
findings. His notes were eventually incorporated 
by John Cassin in his report on the expedition’s 
specimen material published 15 years later, in 
1858. Peale’s and Cassin’s identification of the 
birds on Wake has been accepted without ques- 
tion and has been quoted widely ever since. On 
careful re-examination of the evidence, however, 
it becomes quite apparent that Peale’s notes on 
the Wake Island albatrosses refer not to D. 
alhatrus, but to the Laysan Albatross, D. im- 
mutahilis, which was not recognized as a distinct 
species until 1893, half a century later. 
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