284 
PACIFIC SCIENCE, Vol. Ill, October, 1949 
No specimens are available today to verify 
the identification of the albatrosses Peale found 
nesting on Wake. If Peale collected any speci- 
mens there Cassin does not mention the fact, 
and no other naturalist visited the colony be- 
fore it was wiped out by feather hunters later 
in the 19th century. Peale mentions finding 
both light and dark colored albatrosses on Wake, 
but he believed the dark birds (ostensibly the 
Black-footed Albatross, D. nigripes ) to be the 
immature form of the light colored bird, which 
Cassin lists as D. brachyura (a synonym of D. 
albatrus ), and which he states was the only 
albatross species encountered by the expedition 
in the North Pacific. Most significant, however, 
are Peale’s measurements of the albatross eggs 
he found on Wake, which Cassin gives as 4.2 
x 2.6 inches. These are smaller than those of 
typical D. albatrus from the Bonins and Tori- 
shima, but well within the range of those of D. 
immutabilis from Laysan. 
Had Steller’s Albatross ever bred on Wake, 
it is difficult to account for its absence on the 
Marcus Island rookery, which was visited and 
reported on by both American and Japanese 
naturalists before it, too, succumbed to the at- 
tentions of the feather hunters in the early 20th 
century. Marcus Island lies almost midway be- 
tween Wake and the nearest verified breeding 
grounds of D. albatrus in the Bonins, and is the 
only spot of land in that 1,700-mile expanse of 
sea. Both Bryan (1903: 77-116) and Namiye 
(1905: 219) report D. immutabilis and D. 
nigripes as having bred on Marcus, but no rec- 
cord exists of D. albatrus ever having occurred 
there. Hence, it is unlikely that Steller’s Alba- 
tross ever bred eastward of the Bonin-Izu Island 
chain. 
The first unquestionable record of the nesting 
of Steller’s Albatross is the five eggs in the Pryer 
Collection, which Seebohm (1890: 105) says 
"are labelled as having come from the Bonin 
Islands.” These eggs apparently were collected 
by P. A. Holst, who probably collected at the 
same time the 12 eggs from the Bonins that are 
in the British Museum. Holst himself never 
wrote a word of his experiences in the Bonins, j 
and no one knows on which of the islands he 
collected the eggs. Bent (1922: 7) gives the 
average measurements of 4$ eggs in various 
museums in America and Europe, but he gives 
egg collection dates only for the Bonins and 
adds, "I can not find any description of the 
downy young and doubt if they have ever been 
collected.” 
Nothing, other than Peale’s brief and misap- 
plied account, has ever been written in western 
literature of the species’ breeding habits. No 
occidental ornithologist other than Holst has 
ever, to our knowledge, been on its breeding 
grounds. At least, if anyone has, he has left no 
written record of his experiences. La Touche 
(1895: 327) encountered Steller’s Albatrosses 
in the Pescadores and says that on February 10, 
1894, "they absolutely swarmed” about his 
ship when it was anchored off Fisher Island. 2 
But he found no sign of the bird when he went 
ashore there, and in writing of the species 40 
years later (1935: 429), he lists it as breeding 
only in the Bonins. 
The Hand-List of Japanese Birds for 1932 
and 1942 add the following breeding localities, 
but without further elaboration or substantia- 
tion: Torishima in the southern Izus, Kitano- 
shima and Nishinoshima in the Bonins, Kobisho 
and Agincourt in the southern Ryukyus, and 
the Pescadores. Referring back to the original 
Japanese papers for the evidence on which these 
statements are based, we find some of them to 
be vague and inadequately documented. These 
papers contain, nevertheless, information which 
adds greatly to our knowledge of the species, 
as the following sections show. 
In Japanese, incidentally, albatrosses in gen- 
eral are known as "aho-dori” or "baka-dori,” 
both of which mean "fool-bird.” These appella- 
tions, which date back to medieval times and 
have become integral, autochthonous parts of 
the language, were undoubtedly engendered by 
the birds’ manifest stupidity and tameness, par- 
2 By o-o- to, 23° 36' x 119° 30', one of the larger 
islands in the center of the group. 
