Melinda Conners, on Tern Island, Hawaiian Islands National Wildlife Refuge - The albatross chicks are growing like weeds!  The adults are leaving the chicks unattended for days on end while they endlessly forage throughout the North Pacific Ocean to provide their rapidly growing chick with high-calorie chick-meals. 

The chicks need enough energy to grow their flight feathers, which they will need to have fully grown by June or July when they start to fledge. The feathers are, energetically, very costly to grow, and the adult albatross do their best to bring back large meals of mostly squid, fish and fish eggs from the productive waters of the high latitudes.

Here are a couple of tracks from TOPP's data section. This one is a black-footed albatross.

This track is one of the four Laysan albatross that were tagged.

Black-footed and Laysan adults often leave the breeding colonies before the chicks have grown their full set of flight feathers, so the chicks have to rely on their fat reserves until they master flight and can forage on their own. At this stage in the game, the chicks are so rotund and bottom-heavy that it is difficult to imagine them growing up to become some of the world's best fliers.

[Ed. note: Melinda Conners, a graduate student at California State University, San Bernadino, and working under Scott Shaffer, has been on Tern Island since January 23. She's been putting satellite tags on black-footed and Laysan albatross adults to see where they're foraging for food for their chicks. Since the birds are spending more time at sea now, she's beginning to remove the tags as they return to the nest. She'll finish her work at the end of this month.]