EARTH · GLOBAL BIRD MAP · MIGRATORY
Wandering Albatross
Diomedea exulans. The greatest wingspan of any living bird, circling the Southern Ocean for years at a time. Pooled openly through GBIF, the Wandering Albatross has been recorded 163,488 times across 42 countries — most often in Australia, Antarctica and South Georgia. The map above glows where those records cluster. It’s a known long-distance migrant, but the map shows records, not the journey — no routes, no arrows, no live position.
Counts are GBIF occurrence records published under CC0 or CC-BY only (the openly-reusable subset), so they are a floor, not the full holding — and they track observer effort, not just the bird.
Where it’s recorded most
The countries contributing the most openly-licensed records of the Wandering Albatross. This leans toward nations with many active birdwatchers and open data — it is a map of records, not of where the bird is most abundant.
How to read this map
Each bright cell is a cluster of times someone recorded a Wandering Albatrossand shared it openly — a birder’s checklist, a photo, a museum specimen. It’s a real trace of the bird’s presence, but not a range map: the glow also follows where people look, so well-birded regions shine and quiet ones fade even if the bird is there. Because the Wandering Albatrossmigrates, its records can span continents across the seasons — but this is a pooled all-time snapshot, so it shows the full footprint of sightings, not a moving front or a flight path. There is no LIVE badge: the figures are a snapshot dated 20 Jul 2026.