Rare albatross sighting off Irish coast

These birds with a wing-span of more than 2 metres use updrafts to get airborne — exploiting air currents, they can fly almost without flapping their wings

A black-browed albatross: these birds are tube-nosed seabirds which means they get 'real-time' information on air-speed and wind direction from their Pitot tube nostrils. These birds with a wing-span of up to 2 metres use updrafts to give them lift

Henri Pitot, an 18th Century French engineer, is famous for a device which bears his name. The ‘Pitot tube’ measures the speed of water moving along pipes and canals. It can also monitor air-flows, telling pilots the speed of aircraft. The air entering the tube is brought to an abrupt halt, generating pressure. The faster the flow, the greater that pressure. The meters on today’s aircraft are just sophisticated versions of Pitot’s original. ‘Plus ça change’, he would probably say, were he alive today!

But Pitot was not the first user of such tubes. The fulmars shearwaters and storm-petrels, which breed around the Irish coast, have been deploying them for countless millennia. Now a famous cousin of theirs, a black-browed albatross, has been sighted off our southwest coast. Albatrosses, like their Irish cousins, have tubes on the sides of their bills.