Albatrosses are famously ‘monogamous’, choosing one partner to nest with for most, if not all, of their life. Real life is messy, and this does come with caveats – there’s a bit of ‘extra-pair copulation’ that goes on, and if breeding doesn’t work out well they may choose another partner, if they can. With the large sex-bias towards males in the Antipodean Albatross population, a lot of the males never get to mate at all, because there simply aren’t enough females any more. For every female, there are roughly three males.

Watching these birds get each other after a year at sea, re-affirming their bonds as a pair, is one of the more distracting aspects of life on the island. While doing rounds to check for new nests, there are always a few birds being either very loud in their greetings, or sitting together and quietly, gently preening. The delicacy with which they can use those big, sharp bills is quite amazing. They can pick individual ticks from each other’s faces, in all those spots where it’s impossible to preen yourself.

I watched this pair on their first greeting, the first time she had returned to the nest where he had been building and waiting – you can see the dirt on his bill from nest construction. I noticed them because they were talking to each other, loudly, before settling down for quiet preening. A month or so later, she’s now happily sitting on an egg, waiting for him to come back and take over the next stretch of incubation duties. Hopefully, by December, there will be a chick causing mass vegetation destruction around the site of the nest, flapping and getting ready to fledge. Hopefully, the year after next, this pair will return, re-greet each other, and do it all again.