A biologist banded a Laysan albatross on Midway Atoll in December 1956, and the same bird, Wisdom, was still returning to the colony and raising chicks nearly 70 years later at roughly age 75, making one worn metal leg band the longest-running tracking device in ornithology

On December 10, 1956, a biologist named Chandler Robbins worked his way through the albatross colony on Midway Atoll, a speck of coral halfway between North America and Asia, closing small metal bands around the legs of nesting seabirds. Laysan albatrosses don’t breed before about age five at the earliest, and Wisdom was already incubating an egg when Robbins banded her in 1956. In November 2024, at 74, after her longtime mate Akeakamai stopped returning, she paired with a new male — banded EX25 — laid her first egg in four years, and hatched a chick in January 2025, the oldest known wild bird ever to do so.