The Shark and the Albatross

by John Aitchison

  He lowers his head, points his bill forward and marches towards us, his feet slapping the ground and his head swinging from side to side with each step. He stops a few feet away and calmly looks me in the eye. It is impossible not to smile. Wandering albatrosses nest on a handful of the world’s most remote islands, so they see very few people and he is curious about us, rather than afraid.

  Another bird leaves a mound of plant stems and runs towards the male with an excited whinny. It’s a grey-brown version of himself, the culmination of a whole year’s work by both its parents: taking turns for ninety days to incubate the egg, then nine months caring for the chick. If they have fed it well, the young albatross might weigh more than its father. At first one of its parents would have stayed behind to keep it warm through the storms of the southern autumn but later they both ranged far from Bird Island to find food, sometimes returning to find their chick sitting up to its neck in snow. Wheedling and begging, the young wanderer taps its bill against its father’s, asking to be fed. His throat works, he lowers his head and opens his bill slightly and the chick slips its own inside. A grey slurry shoots into its mouth, as if it’s being pumped through a hose. It does not spill a drop. Bringing their youngster this far has cost its parents so much effort that before starting another family the pair will take a year off. One chick every two years is as slow as reproduction gets in birds. It’s something Lance Tickell was the first to notice.

  This all leads to a vital rite of passage shared by almost every bird: their first flight. The chick’s life and all its parents’ effort will depend on that first crucial leap into the air and young wandering albatrosses have a harder time of it than most. On their own they must work out how to use the world’s largest wings without breaking their fragile bones. It’s a time of intense concentration and risk, which, of course, should make it perfect for television, but we may not have many chances to film it. The number of white adults on the island is deceptive. Half of them are courting pairs and they will not have chicks until next year, so there are far fewer young birds about to fledge. Those we can see seem more interested in being fed than in taking off. Filming one flying for the first time is going to be a real challenge.

  I have been forgiven for waking everyone earlier; or at least they are all kind enough not to mention it. Kindness, in such a small group of people, is as important as the roof over our heads. An instance of this is when we each take our turn to cook. On Bird Island’s fiftieth anniversary as a scientific base it falls to me. The preparations fill much of the day, as there is also tomorrow’s bread to bake and cakes too, if it’s film night on a Saturday or a birthday like Bird Island’s. I spend some time running through the things the others like or dislike, just as they do when it’s their turn to cook, imagining what each person will want to eat after spending a cold day measuring albatrosses on the hill or counting seal pups on the shore. My niece’s recipe for syrup pudding seems the perfect thing, as it’s full of eggs, butter and sugar, so I triple the quantities and get mixing. On the base there is an unwritten but iron rule: after all this effort it is absolutely not allowed to come in late, grab some toast and eat it in your room. The meal, which has been carefully planned (though sometimes a little charred) is always shared and appreciated with laughter, conversation and thanks, so every day we all notice the care that one of us has taken on everyone’s behalf.

  Filming wildlife is a bit like this too. It is vital to put myself in the place of the animals I’m watching, to try to see things as they see them. It helps me predict what they are going to do next, and when you share others’ experiences like this you usually grow fond of them. This has happened with the albatrosses but not so far (at least in my case) with Bird Island’s fur seals.

  The syrup pudding goes down a storm and I hope it makes up for the early morning alarm. After eating it and the birthday cake, we dress as 1950s scientists, in garish, BAS-issued check shirts and woolly hats, which takes me no time as I’m dressed like that already, and gather on the jetty. At the end there is a flagpole and the outdoor toilet, with a bird painted on the door: it’s a wandering albatross, of course. Standing there, surrounded by disgruntled seals, we raise our glasses to Lance Tickell and his discoveries.

  In the current batch of biologists there’s a Canadian called Glenn Cross who tells me he has met one of the birds Tickell ringed as a chick in 1959: a grey-headed albatross, a smaller relative of the wanderer. I imagine this happened many years earlier but Glenn says he found her just last week. Lance Tickell retired long ago but at least one of his original albatrosses is still going strong. She is now among the world’s oldest known birds. At first sight, Glenn says, there is no sign that she is older than the others, all sitting on their cylindrical mud nests, which look like squat chimneys. Like them she has moulted her plumage for the breeding season and looks gorgeous in her new feathers. Her bill, like theirs, has a bright yellow stripe, set off handsomely by its black surround. Only her feet give away her great age. Their skin is thin and almost transparent.

  ‘They’re covered with lines like the patterns clay makes when it dries,’ Glenn says, ‘like the thin skin I remember on my grandmother’s hands when she was sewing, when I was a boy. Her hands were how I could tell she was old.’

  Even though the albatross is almost fifty, she is incubating an egg. Counting the generations we reckon that, at most, nine could have passed since she came out of her own egg, so somewhere on Bird Island her great-great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughters and grandsons might soon be hatching. There is no mutual care in albatrosses, apart from when they feed their chicks and some gentle preening between mates, so great (x7) grandmother or not, she must still go to sea to feed. Glenn talks with respect about how hard it must be to survive for so many years in the Southern Ocean, and how much she must know about icebergs and whales and winter storms. We imagine the sights she has seen in her million air miles, travelling solely by the power of the wind.

  Research done on Bird Island shows that age and experience have their price for albatrosses, just as they do for us. Older birds fly further and take longer to find food. I wonder how Glenn’s albatross manages when she is out there on her own. Perhaps her navigational senses have dulled or, like my grandma, maybe sometimes she just can’t remember where she lives.

  A week after Bird Island’s birthday it is my turn and I stand by a window in the base to call my parents. As we talk I watch the fur seals outside, feinting and glaring at each other. Making the call is absurdly easy, via the internet and a satellite link, as though it is nothing to be living on a storm-wracked island so far away. I tell my mother about the cards I’ve opened this morning, which the children gave me before I left home. Freya has drawn a snowy scene where a small house stands by a jetty, with warm yellow light spilling from its windows and a horseshoe above the door, the right way up for catching luck. On the shore a lone figure points his camera at the sky, where two brown albatrosses soar against the mountains – they are fledgling wanderers. This is how she thinks of me, on my own in some faraway place. Mine is a lovely job, we both know that, but I have missed more than half her birthdays.

  As always my grandma was right: time does pass very quickly when your children are young. When I call home they sing to me and the last thing I hear is my youngest, Kirsty, blowing kisses down the phone. Tomorrow is her birthday and I will miss that too.

  So far we have had no luck filming a young wanderer taking its first flight and the pressure to film the fur seals is mounting. The beaches are becoming more crowded each day and fights between males are increasingly common.

  In Lance Tickell’s film he mentioned that, although he had watched the albatrosses every day for four years, he had never seen a young bird fly away.

  ‘That’s incredible, Derren, isn’t it – he never saw it happen?’

  ‘No he didn’t and neither have I.’

  It’s quite a bombshell: we are halfway through our month on Bird Island, obliged to switch to fil
ming the seals for a while, and now our chances of filming a wanderer’s first flight seem more remote than ever.

  The stream running down behind the base is our drinking supply, so any contamination from the fur seals that sometimes die in it must be filtered out before we can drink the water. Dirt from our boots seems trivial by comparison and walking in the streambed remains the safest way to move around. Everywhere else the seals hem in the buildings and the pier, the males making conical islands in a sea of slimmer, otter-shaped females. The beach is now so full that it’s all but impossible to cross.

  I have filmed other animals fighting ferociously, red deer stags for instance, but I have never seen anything like this beach. It looks like the Somme. There is mud and blood everywhere, with roaring, snarling enemies tearing at each other’s throats: flesh is gouged and blood pumps from veins. Watching them fight is an assortment of birds: sheathbills, skuas and giant petrels, even gentle-faced pintail ducks, grown minute in their isolation and with a quite un-ducky taste for meat. They are all waiting for a seal to die, or at least to lie still enough to be eaten. It is an intimidating scene but not completely anarchic. Many of the females cluster around the largest and most successful bulls, unharassed by others, providing they stay close. If some were not at sea feeding there would be 9,000 seals on this part of the beach: three in every square metre. There is plenty to film – but where to start?

  Some of the females in front of me are certain to give birth today and the closest male will want to keep them to himself, so this could be a good place to film a fight. I walk partway into the battleground and crouch by the camera but it is hard to stay focused on the filming, despite having two broom handles close at hand, because every snarl makes me twitch. Something bangs into my foot and I jump back. It is only an inquisitive pup: small, black and purring for its mother. When it looks up from my boot its purrs turn to growls. Even the pups want me to leave, and watching for incoming males is so distracting that I hardly have time to look through the lens. There must be a better way.

  Our boat has come back to pick up Matt, who is needed elsewhere, and to drop off his replacement, the same Fredi I filmed peregrines with in New York, as well as Ted, the cameraman who was with me in Svalbard. Ted is going to concentrate on slow motion while I film at normal speed, looking out especially for what happens to the pups. As a parting gift Matt has welded some old fuel drums into a full metal jacket, or at least a full metal kilt. Once we are inside its walls the fighting seals ignore us and it even has handles, so we can lift it up and walk around. We are ready to film in the heart of the colony.

  More females are arriving all the time and I film one from the safety of the portable fort, as she sets out from the shallows with her wet coat reflecting the sky. She is only two-thirds as tall as the males and less than a quarter of their weight but her urge to give birth exactly where she was born is irresistible and she weaves and ducks between them. Two males block her way, closing in on each other with their heads up and eyes rolling, baring their teeth. One lunges and grabs the thick ruff of fur at the other’s neck, worrying it like a dog with a rag. The other male lashes out and carves a gash in his forehead. They charge back and forth across the border between their territories, scattering pups and mothers. One pup is bowled over and trampled under their flippers but it scuttles off, apparently unhurt. The males trade bite for bite, ripping at each other’s heads and necks, then lean together like exhausted boxers, with their sides heaving. One shakes himself, so close that salt spray covers the lens. The female takes her chance to join the group nearest me. The males can hardly raise their heads as she slips past. Every year she will breed with whoever is strong enough to hold this piece of beach, but for the males it’s all or nothing. Only those who can defend a good patch have any chance of mating, which for them justifies the risks they take in battle.

  Despite the violence I am warming to the seals at last. The newly arrived female is gorgeous as well as daring. Her wet fur is spiky but where it parts it reveals a soft inner pile. This was once the hottest commodity in China and its valuable trade was why most of South Georgia’s earliest visitors came here to kill seals. By the time the hunting stopped, around the start of the twentieth century, there were just a few hundred left. What has happened since then is an extraordinary success story. The seals were protected in 1908 and left alone for 100 years. There may now be as many as 4 million of them.

  Two weeks later, purrs have largely replaced the males’ snarls and there is more new life than death on the beach. I watch one female who seems restless, arching her back beyond the vertical, while the others lie like sleek torpedoes beside their pups. She sways from side to side and her flanks twitch: her baby is kicking. This is so vital a time, such an elemental act. I am fascinated by it: the only births I have seen firsthand were my own children’s. As her waters break, the nearest male leans towards her until his muzzle gently touches hers. The pup’s flippers come first, folded together like grey kid gloves. It slithers quickly out, with a membrane caul covering its head: proof against drowning, people used to say, when a human child was born like this. The female calls, keening directly into her pup’s ears and it wriggles, wet and black, then opens its eyes and bleats back, like a toy.

  I remember the calm time after my own first child was born. Time spent just cradling her in my hands, gazing at her face, at her wide, blue eyes and her fingers with nails the size of lentils. She barely filled my two palms. I was feeling her touch, learning her smell, and I could almost feel my mind rewiring itself, promising to look after her, come what may. These fur seals are the same: the new mum and her pup, wide-eyed and nose-to-nose, sniffing and calling into each other’s faces, learning each other. How else would they ever stay together in all this chaos? Tucked in to suckle, the pup sighs and shuts its eyes and I can’t help but smile.

  It is time to go back to filming the albatrosses and I show Fredi the route along the streambed, turning at the corner where there’s always an antsy seal. After Derren’s bombshell it is hard to be positive about our chances but another unlikely event cheers us up as we climb: for the first time in months the fog lifts and the sun shines on Bird Island. From the ridge above the base the buildings look tiny, surrounded by the dark tide of seals that has filled the beach right to their walls. The bay is quite sheltered but, as usual, there’s a wind blowing up here.

  Derren knows of an albatross colony on the far side of the island where there are more young birds and a spectacular view of South Georgia. To reach it we must climb high around the flank of the largest hill. The wind grabs loose slabs of rock, lifting and dropping them with alarming bangs, and clouds spin from the peak as if they have been speeded up in the camera, turning the sun on and off. For some time we concentrate on placing our feet carefully, glad again of the broom handles, and when I lift my eyes the wind and the view take my breath away. Three icebergs, speedwell blue, are grounded below the cliffs of South Georgia and above them climbs an almost sheer range of mountains in grey, red and green. The more distant peaks are jagged and corniced with snow. It is as if the Alps have been flooded by the sea. In between there is a wild piece of water called Bird Sound. Kelp bruises its surface, purple and brown, and in the deeper channel there are lines of white splashes, the Morse code of fur seals porpoising home. Below us adult albatrosses are scattered like sheep across the hillside, with perhaps forty fledglings among them, many flexing their new wings or preening out their last bits of down. Some are weaving through the tussock, heading uphill. We must quickly work out which of them is most likely to fly.

  One of the most active youngsters leads us to the top of a steep slope above the sea. It seems a good place to practise taking off. The albatross ignores me as I crouch to set up the camera. On the upper surface of its wings the new feathers are arranged in long rows, as neatly as slates on a roof. Its pointed primary feathers are crinkled, as if they have just been unwrapped. A squall races up the tussock slope towards us and I wonder whether this yo
ungster has any clue about how to use its wings. It opens them to the breeze, feeling a new sensation that we call lift. It’s the start of a relationship with the wind that will last a lifetime. It tenses its wings, straightens them, and the wind raises the bird teetering into the air. For a moment it hangs there with its feet trailing, then instability takes over and the long drop below becomes real. The albatross is dumped in the grass halfway down the slope. Fredi and I watch anxiously as it prises itself from a hollow, with its beak caked in mud, and struggles up through the tussock to try again. I film it making several more flights, trying to control its wings and move forward through the air. After each crash it climbs laboriously back up.

  Snow starts to fall. The albatross and I are both cold and disheartened and it has had enough. It folds its wings, settles into the tussock with its bill tucked into its feathers and shuts its eyes. Snowflakes land on its forehead and rest there without melting.