Midway Island’s Weirdest Facts: Wisdom the 74-Year-Old Bird, a Bowling Alley, and 20 Tons of Plastic a Year

Midway Atoll is a speck of land roughly 1,300 miles northwest of Honolulu, so remote that if there were a bridge, it would take you over 52 hours of straight driving from Seattle to reach it. It’s home to the oldest known wild bird on Earth. It hosted one of the most decisive naval battles of World War II. And every single year, it gets buried under tons of plastic garbage that washes in from thousands of miles away, none of it thrown there by anyone who has ever set foot on the island. Here’s what makes this place so strange.

The Island Belongs to the Birds, Not the People

The human population of Midway hovers around 40 people, mostly wildlife researchers, refuge staff, and the crew keeping the emergency runway operational. The bird population during breeding season runs into the millions. Roughly 1.5 million Laysan albatross alone descend on the atoll each winter, which works out to something like one bird per square foot of available land. The Hawaiian name for the atoll is Pihemanu, which literally translates to “the loud din of birds.” Whoever named it clearly meant it.

Midway hosts about 70 percent of the entire global population of Laysan albatross and roughly a third of all black-footed albatross. This isn’t a large colony among many. It’s the largest colony on the planet, for two entire species, sitting on two and a quarter square miles of sand.

Wisdom Is Older Than Almost Everyone Reading This

There’s a specific albatross at Midway named Wisdom who is, as far as anyone can verify, the oldest known wild bird alive anywhere on Earth. She’s a Laysan albatross first banded by researchers in 1956, which makes her at least 74 years old as of 2026. She has raised somewhere between 10 and 40 chicks over her lifetime, and she is still, astonishingly, an active breeding bird, returning to the same nesting grounds year after year.

Albatrosses spend around 95 percent of their lives at sea, only touching down on land to breed. Wisdom has likely flown millions of miles over the course of her life without anyone fully tracking the total. She keeps coming back to the same tiny patch of sand in the middle of the Pacific, decade after decade, outliving multiple generations of the researchers who study her.

The Plastic Problem Is Almost Impossible to Overstate

This is the part of Midway’s story that stops being charming fast. Every year, an estimated 20 tons of plastic debris washes up on the atoll’s beaches, carried in by ocean currents from thousands of miles away, much of it connected to the broader Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The US Fish and Wildlife Service estimates at least 100 pounds of new plastic arrives on Midway’s shores every single week.

Adult albatrosses make it dramatically worse without meaning to. Out foraging at sea, they mistake floating plastic fragments for squid or fish eggs, scoop it up, and fly it hundreds or even a thousand miles back to feed directly to their chicks. Researchers estimate adult albatrosses collectively feed around five tons of plastic to chicks on Midway every year. One biologist who spent years necropsying chicks found plastic debris in 97 percent of them, sometimes so much that there was barely room left in the stomach for actual food.

Because albatross chicks don’t develop the ability to regurgitate until they’re about four months old, they can’t expel what they’ve swallowed. Some chicks have been found with more than 500 individual pieces of plastic in their stomachs: bottle caps, cigarette lighters, toy fragments, toothbrushes, golf balls, shotgun shells. Refuge staff describe finding piles of colorful plastic scattered on the sand with no bird carcass anywhere nearby, because the bird decomposed entirely and the plastic just stayed behind, permanently, exactly where it died.

The Lead Paint Problem Nobody Saw Coming

Plastic isn’t the only thing that’s quietly poisoned Midway’s birds. For decades, the old military buildings scattered across Sand Island were coated in lead-based paint, standard for mid-20th-century construction. As that paint deteriorated and flaked off over the years, albatross chicks nesting near the buildings ended up ingesting lead paint chips, leading to documented cases of lead poisoning in the local population.

It took until 2018 for a dedicated project to finally strip the lead paint from the remaining structures, more than two decades after the military left the island entirely. It’s a strange kind of pollution to worry about on an island otherwise known mainly for its remoteness: not chemical runoff or industrial waste, just old paint flaking off abandoned barracks onto birds that had never seen a human building before humans built one there.

A 2011 Tsunami Actually Washed Over the Island

On March 10, 2011, the same magnitude 9.0 earthquake off Japan that triggered the catastrophic Tōhoku tsunami sent waves all the way across the Pacific to Midway. The tsunami completely submerged Spit Island, one of the atoll’s three landmasses, and covered roughly 60 percent of Eastern Island and 20 percent of Sand Island.

Tens of thousands of birds died in a single night, drowned or swept away by water that had traveled thousands of miles from its source. No human residents were hurt, which given the scale of the flooding, is genuinely remarkable. A Laysan albatross chick that survived the tsunami became something of a symbol afterward, a single bird that made it through a wave generated by an earthquake on the other side of the ocean.

Under the Sand Is Also a Bowling Alley

Midway spent 52 years, from 1941 to 1993, as an active US military base, and the remnants of that era are still scattered across Sand Island: barracks, a mess hall, bunkers, gun emplacements, an abandoned movie theater, and, somewhat bizarrely, a functioning bowling alley left over from when thousands of servicemembers were stationed there. Visitors and researchers today can walk past rusting shell casings on the beach, remnants of a 5-inch gun still positioned to watch the horizon, and the shipwrecked hull of what was likely once a landing craft, now used mainly as a perch by seabirds that have never known the place as anything but a wildlife refuge.

Before it was a military base, Midway briefly served as a stopover for Pan American Airways’ luxury Pacific Clipper flying boats in the late 1930s, complete with a 45-room hotel and a swimming pool, catering to wealthy travelers paying more than three times an average American’s annual salary for the trip. Before that, it was the site of the first transpacific submarine telegraph cable, inaugurated in 1903 with a message from President Theodore Roosevelt that circled the globe in nine minutes.

The Battle That Made It Famous, Briefly

Midway’s most widely known claim to fame is the Battle of Midway, fought June 3 to 6, 1942, generally considered the turning point of the Pacific theater in World War II. Japan lost most of its best naval pilots and four aircraft carriers in the fighting, a blow from which its navy never fully recovered. It’s the reason most people who’ve heard of Midway at all know the name.

What almost nobody realizes is that the same tiny atoll now hosting the largest albatross colony on Earth, buried under tons of imported plastic, home to a 74-year-old bird still raising chicks, was also the site of one of the most consequential naval battles in modern history. All of it happened, and continues happening, on two and a quarter square miles of sand in the middle of an ocean most people will never see up close.