🕊️ In 1949, an American ornithologist declared the short-tailed albatross extinct. Two years later, a weather observer on a remote Japanese volcano spotted about ten of them still nesting on a crumbling cliff. This is the story of how those ten birds became more than ten thousand, and of the life-size models and recorded calls that talked a species back from the edge.

A "treasure island" built on slaughter

Torishima sits roughly 600 kilometers south of Tokyo, a near-circular volcanic island barely 2.5 kilometers across. For most of the year it has no people on it at all. But it is the main home of the short-tailed albatross, the largest seabird in the North Pacific, with a wingspan over two meters, a body of four to five kilograms, and an oversized pink bill that turns blue at the tip with age.

The bird's Japanese name, ahōdori, literally means "fool bird." It earned the insult honestly. Albatrosses are clumsy on land, slow to take off, and show almost no fear of humans, so a person could simply walk up and club them. On islands where they nested in dense colonies, that made them tragically easy to kill in bulk.

A century and a half ago there were at least several hundred thousand of them across the islands of the western North Pacific. Edo-era writers described flocks so thick that when the birds rose together they looked like white pillars standing on the sea. Then, in 1887, a Meiji-era entrepreneur named Han'emon Tamaoki began harvesting their feathers for the European down-bedding trade. By around 1890 some 400,000 birds a year were being killed on Torishima alone. One hunter could club 100 to 200 in a day. At the peak, about 300 people lived on the island, with an elementary school and even a small rail line to haul the carcasses. The barren rock had become a "treasure island." By 1902, by one estimate, at least five million albatrosses had been killed.

The volcano that buried the settlement

Torishima is an active volcano, and in August 1902 it erupted. The central cone blew apart, a new crater opened in the middle of the island, and all 125 feather hunters living there died. Tamaoki himself happened to be in Tokyo. Within a year his company had sent new settlers back to resume the killing.

The slaughter and the volcano together nearly finished the species. Hunting was finally banned in 1933, by which point only about 50 birds remained. In 1949 the ornithologist Oliver Austin concluded the short-tailed albatross was probably extinct. Then, on a January morning in 1951, Shōji Yamamoto of the Torishima weather station found roughly ten of them alive and breeding on a steep slope called Tsubamezaki.

That single surviving colony carried two problems on its back. The slope is loose volcanic soil that slides and washes away, burying eggs and chicks. And it is one active volcano. A single large eruption could erase the entire species in a day.

The professor who spent four decades on the island

Weather-station staff began rough-and-ready conservation in the 1950s, culling feral cats and replanting grass to firm up the nesting ground. After the station closed in 1965, the work nearly lapsed. Then a young researcher took it up and never let go.

Hiroshi Hasegawa, a biologist at Toho University, first went to Torishima in the late 1970s and ended up making the crossing around 46 times. From 1979 he banded every chick born on the island, which is why almost every Torishima albatross alive today has a numbered ring and a known birth year. He became known simply as the "albatross professor." Forty-two years of his life went into this one bird.

Hasegawa understood the core difficulty. Albatrosses are colonial nesters, and they are reluctant to start a colony from scratch. Young birds want to settle where other albatrosses already are. Once the "culture" of a nesting site is lost, the birds will not easily rebuild it on their own, even when good habitat sits empty nearby. The crumbling Tsubamezaki slope was dangerous, but the birds kept crowding onto it because that was the only place that looked like home.

So in 1992, working with the Yamashina Institute for Ornithology under a contract from the Ministry of the Environment, Hasegawa tried something audacious. On a gentler, more stable slope on the west side of the island, called Hatsunezaki, the team set out dozens of life-size albatross models and played recordings of albatross calls. The idea was to fake a thriving colony, so that passing young birds would look down, see and hear what appeared to be hundreds of companions, and decide to stay. The technique has a name: social attraction.

An ocean away, the same idea

The same insight had already changed seabird conservation on the other side of the Pacific. In 1973, a young Audubon ornithologist named Stephen Kress set out to bring Atlantic puffins back to Eastern Egg Rock, a tiny island off the coast of Maine where hunters had wiped them out decades earlier. He moved puffin chicks from Canada and raised them by hand, then borrowed an old trick from Icelandic puffin hunters: he planted carved wooden decoys, later adding mirrors and recorded calls. For years nothing happened. Then, on the Fourth of July in 1981, a puffin landed carrying a fish in its bill, the sure sign that a chick had hatched.

Kress had stumbled into a general principle. Birds follow other birds. Today his social-attraction method, often combined with moving chicks to new sites, has been used on roughly a third of the world's seabird species at more than 500 locations. The Smithsonian lists the short-tailed albatross among the birds it has helped save. Two teams an ocean apart, with no contact between them at first, had made the same bet.

Then it worked

On Torishima, it took years, exactly as it had in Maine. The first chick hatched at the decoy site of Hatsunezaki in 1995. By 2006, more than ten chicks fledged there in a single season, which meant a genuine second colony had taken hold. Today the island has three breeding sites.

But three colonies on one volcano is still one volcano. So between 2008 and 2012, Japanese teams took out an insurance policy. They airlifted albatross chicks by helicopter about 350 kilometers south to Mukojima, an uninhabited, volcano-free island in the Ogasawara group, where the species had bred before vanishing. Researchers camped on the empty island with no electricity or running water, mincing squid and sardines into a paste and feeding it to the chicks through a tube, standing in for absent parents. In 2016 the gamble paid off: a chick hatched naturally at Mukojima to a pair that included a hand-reared bird, the first time the species had bred there in roughly 80 years.

And the numbers kept climbing. This breeding season, 2025-26, the Yamashina Institute counted 1,591 chicks on Torishima, about 20 percent more than the previous season. Adding an estimated 2,114 breeding pairs and several thousand younger birds, the team put the total at roughly 11,067. "Even allowing for the margin of error," said researcher Naoki Tomita, "we believe it is over ten thousand."

Still only a waypoint

It is a genuine milestone, and also a partial one. Japan's 2026 Red List still classifies the short-tailed albatross as Vulnerable, and the United States lists it as Endangered. To be downgraded to merely Near Threatened, the species needs its other colonies, on Mukojima and on Minami-kojima in the Senkaku Islands, to keep growing, and it needs the unstable Torishima slope shored up. The recovery is real but not finished.

Tomita points to something in the name. Ahōdori, the "fool bird," carries the memory of human foolishness as much as the bird's own clumsiness. The same hands that nearly wiped it out are now the ones nursing it back. Hasegawa, for his part, has long argued the bird deserves a better name, okinotayū, the great bird of the open sea.

These comebacks are slow and unglamorous, built on a few stubborn people returning to a hard place year after year. Maine's puffins and Japan's albatross each took decades. Has a species in your country ever come back from the brink, and who were the people quietly making it happen?

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