After more than a year of promising, I'm finally reworking the Seabirds v1 and v2 sets. These are some of the most neglected models in my Songbird ReMix series and way overdue for their update. I did this Albatross as a test of the "long-necked" seabird model revisions. I still much more work to get it right but it's getting closer. Maybe somewhere late February-Marchish the first of these updates will be ready. The background birds are Glaucous Gulls and I used Nerd3D's "Waves at the Beach" set. The image was rendered in firefly. The Black-footed Albatross nests in colonies on isolated islands of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands (Laysan and Midway), and the Japanese islands of Tori Shima, Bonin, and Senkaku and can be seen from Alaska to California and Japan. This endangered bird has approximately 120,000 mature individuals left. It is taken incidentally by long-line fishing with an estimated 4,000 to 8,000 killed every year. It is also vulnerable to oil and ingestion of floating plastics, which reduces the space in the stomach available for food to be brought to the chick. All of its nesting sites in the U.S. are protected. Albatrosses form long term pair-bonds that last for life. After fledging the birds return to the colony after three years, and spend two years building nests, dancing and being with prospective mates, a behavior that probably evolved to ensure maximum trust between the birds (raising an albatross chick is a massive energetic investment, and a long courting period establishes for both birds that the other is committed). The Black-footed Albatross is one of three Albatrosses found in the northern Hemisphere and is the only dark colored one. It has a keen sense of smell, which it uses to locate food across vast expanses of ocean. It will scare other predators away from its food by spreading its wings and screaming at it. It drinks seawater and excretes excess salt through glands above the eyes. The Black-footed Albatross has a number of apparent adaptations to stay cool at hot, exposed nest sites. These include an extensive network of blood vessels in the head, as well as a habit of raising the feet off the ground. Hawaiian name Ka'upu describes the bird’s call.