Fifty Million Birds and One Albatross Down to Thirty Pairs

Crozet, Kerguelen, Saint-Paul and Amsterdam are specks in the southern Indian Ocean with no permanent population, and between them they host more than 50 million birds of 47 species, four of them endemic and twelve on the IUCN Red List. France made them a national nature reserve on 3 October 2006 and UNESCO inscribed them as World Heritage in July 2019. The reserve holds the world's largest populations of king penguin and yellow-nosed albatross, and its most precarious resident is the Amsterdam albatross, which breeds on a single island and nowhere else: roughly 180 individuals, about thirty breeding pairs a year, and critically endangered. Management here is mostly about what is kept out — introduced predators, disease, and longline fishing gear that drowns albatrosses when they follow boats.