The Shark and the Albatross

by John Aitchison

  On the way back through the colony a glint of steel catches my eye. It’s a fish hook as long as my thumb, lying by an empty nest. In the lab Derren shows me a pile of others, all recovered from nests on Bird Island and all potentially lethal. These are just the ones the birds have brought back and regurgitated, along with food for their chicks. They meet many more hooks at sea. Derren has just received an email with some bad news about this: A wandering albatross with leg ring 5216188 was found dead at location 35°55′ South, 51°56′ West.

  ‘That’s off the coast of Uruguay,’ he says. ‘It’s a very popular place for our birds to forage and also to be caught.’

  The BAS database shows that the ring was given to a young female from Bird Island. She has died nearly 1,300km (800 miles) away. She fledged eight years ago from a nest on the ridge above the base and was not seen here again until she reappeared five years later, in a group of awkward adolescents visiting the colony to meet other young birds and practise their displays. In time she found a mate and Derren came to know them well. He has been photographing their first chick every week since it hatched. It is sitting out there now, almost ready to fly and waiting for its parents to return. On his computer Derren shows us a small dot on the map next to the date its mother died. It is surrounded by many dozens of other dots.

  ‘Those are just a tiny fraction of the birds who die, the ones whose rings are recovered on boats fishing for tuna. A hundred thousand albatrosses of all kinds die like this every year.’

  They might be the masters of the world’s wildest oceans but nothing in their long experience has taught albatrosses not to swallow hooks hidden in floating fish. Some boats use lines 130km (80 miles) long, set with 10,000 baited hooks. Since the long-line fishery began off Uruguay and Brazil in the 1990s, the wandering albatrosses of South Georgia have declined at about 4 per cent a year. These birds, raising only one chick every two years, simply cannot take the loss.

  The albatrosses live and die where hardly anyone ever sees them. For them this is almost as great a problem as swallowing fish hooks because, for the people who could help, seeing is believing. That’s where films can make a difference. Photography is a young medium and television is younger still, but moving pictures can be more compelling than even first-hand descriptions of such dramatic events as my grandma’s Zeppelin, and unlike human memories, films last. That’s one reason wildlife films matter: they’re a set of permanent memories we can all share, making real those things we have not seen for ourselves, such as the plight of the albatrosses. In time perhaps this will make us wiser about protecting what we still have, by making it harder for anyone to say, ‘I didn’t know.’

  I hope our filming on Bird Island helps the albatrosses. It would be tragic if films become the only way to watch a female wanderer banking low over her colony, while male after male throw back their heads to call her down from the sky.

  A few days after its mother died off Uruguay the orphaned chick took to the air and flew away. None of us saw it go and three weeks on I am still struggling to film a young albatross taking off, but this morning the wind has risen to a full gale and there is a different feeling among the birds. They are scattered all over the hillside and many are facing the wind, exercising their wings. One seems especially promising: it is heading purposefully for the steepest part of the ridge. Whenever it stops it half-opens its wings to test the air. Fredi and I close the distance as quickly as we can, stumbling through the tussock with the camera equipment. The bird has reached a perfect spot where the wind blows straight up the slope with a long drop below. Even better, there is a view of the sea beyond, so if it does fly from here the shot will be wonderful. I cannot afford to miss the moment and I run through the grass mounds and bogs, with the camera bouncing on my shoulder. The young albatross is already on the lip of the slope, opening its wings to feel the updraughts.

  ‘Please don’t go,’ I say under my breath. ‘Not now, please.’

  Wrestling to set up the tripod, I have stuck one of its legs deep in the tussock. The bird gives a few shallow flaps, looking intently out to sea, and then tilts into the attitude it will take in flight. I wrench the tripod free and plonk it down, levelling the camera with one hand and turning it on with the other. The bird lifts onto its toes in a gust, its wingtips quivering. At last the camera is running and framed and focused and my plea changes: ‘Please go. Go now!’ and as though it has been flying all its life, the albatross lifts from the ground and sails away. In seconds it has crossed the coast, gaining height and already it is further from its nest than it has ever been before. Soon it is just a dark shape, flying strongly across the face of a distant iceberg. It is the most enormous relief – for us both. For the next few years and perhaps as many as five or six, it will circle the world, then somehow find its way back to Bird Island, to look for a mate within yards of its nest, and learn how to dance. Soon I will be leaving too, but my journey home doesn’t feel so long any more.

  On our last night the scientists throw a party. It’s a barbecue, outside in the falling sleet. We stand close to the fire, warming our beers in gloved hands while seals call ‘oof choof’ around us and albatrosses circle overhead. It is so cold that we almost don’t notice the smell. As a leaving present I have made Derren and the others another huge syrup pudding.

  ‘You can stay!’ they say, and I am touched as well as tempted.

  When we weigh anchor before dawn the base is just a murky outline above the beach dark with seals, but the generator is already running and the kitchen light is on. As we slip away I wonder who is on start-up.

  At home I find my grandmother has her leg in traction.

  ‘You’ve broken your hip, Grandma. You’ve had a fall.’

  ‘Have I, dear?’ she says. ‘Well, I suppose I must have because it does hurt. It really grips sometimes and then I have to say “five fives are twenty-five,” but you mustn’t give in to it, or if you do it’s very hard to come back.’

  I think of the young albatross climbing the hill after each crashlanding. Its determination to keep trying was so similar to hers: this quiet woman who has lived, without complaining, through losing her home to a wartime bomb, then the husband she loved and finally her memories too.

  In my favourite photograph she is smooth-skinned and beautiful, shyly modelling a hairstyle for her first employer, a hairdresser. The memories that have stayed with her longest are all from that time: how she loved to dance the foxtrot with my grandad, their delight in growing plants together and their pride at counting more than 100 morning glories, blooming outside their door one summer’s dawn.

  I leave her with two pictures: one of my children smiling and a card from my sister, of some morning glories. Their blue petals are a shade paler than the nurses’ uniforms but the exact colour of the sky through the window behind my grandma’s bed: they are photographs being memories.

  I am often away when my family needs me most. It is the biggest sacrifice of this way of life – so is it worthwhile? The shots I filmed during that month among the fur seals and the albatrosses comprised just six minutes of the finished programme, but how much time a story lasts on screen matters less than how long it stays in our minds. Series like Frozen Planet reach a huge audience. Where once no one had seen a wanderer take its first flight, now more than 100 million people, all over the world, have shared the experience. Perhaps, when they face problems of their own, some might remember seeing a young albatross that never gave up and learned to fly.

  AN UPDATE ON ALBATROSSES

  No albatrosses breed in the United Kingdom, but the remnants of empire extend to some of the remote islands in the South Atlantic that suit them so well, places like Bird Island in South Georgia. That’s why the British Antarctic Survey and UK-based conservation organisations, such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and BirdLife International, play important roles in helping them.

  Since we filmed the wandering albatrosses on Bird Island their numbers have continued to fall –
they have halved since the early 1960s – but there are some signs of hope, according to Dr Cleo Small who heads BirdLife International’s Marine Programme. The Albatross Taskforce, set up in the late 1990s, has promoted simple ways to prevent birds swallowing baited hooks, including the use of streamers, weighted lines and fishing at night. Cleo hopes that by 2015/16 the numbers of birds dying in all fisheries will have fallen by 80 per cent. Recent changes in Uruguay and a new Brazilian law on mandatory boat inspections, make this seem possible for the first time.

  Better still, recent albatross counts from Bird Island may be showing that at last the changes are working. Dr Richard Phillips, a seabird ecologist at the British Antarctic Survey, says that the count of breeding wanderers reached its lowest ever point in 2013/14, but in the next breeding season it climbed back to a level similar to 2008/9. He remains cautious, saying it is too soon to be sure the worst is over – 2015/16 will be the clincher.

  Cleo Small says it should be possible to save albatrosses without adversely affecting people’s livelihoods, which is unusual for a conservation problem. Even so, the campaign has taken a long time to make a difference. The large number of birds dying first came to global attention in the late 1990s, but for the next decade the wandering albatrosses on Bird Island carried on declining. Without the regular counts started by Lance Tickell, their decline might have gone unnoticed for much longer.

  ‘We have been waiting for this to happen for years,’ Cleo says, ‘but as the birds only breed every two years, any recovery will be slow.’ Most encouraging, though, is that much of the Albatross Taskforce’s work has been funded by donations. It seems that many of us do care about what happens to these birds, even though they live at the other end of the Earth, where most of us are unlikely ever to meet them in person.

  Richard Phillips kindly checked the albatross records for me, to see whether the wanderer chick that was orphaned while we were on Bird Island in 2008 had survived to find its way home: ‘Orange C50 has indeed been seen back at Bird Island. It first returned as a non-breeding bird in 2011/12 and has been seen (as a non breeder) every season since then.’

  In 2012 Bird Island’s second highest hill was named Tickell Peak in honour of the man who started the study of the island’s albatrosses. Lance Tickell died two years later.

  – TWELVE –

  LIVES IN THE BALANCE

  There are few beaches more beautiful than New Island’s pale crescents of sand. You could be in the tropics if the air were not so brisk and there were no penguins waiting on the shore. These are gentoo penguins, which also live on the frozen beaches of South Georgia and further south, in Antarctica. Thanks to a quirk of the currents in the South Atlantic, the Falkland Islands lie in the warmer waters north of a line called the Antarctic Convergence, while at the same latitude but on the other side of the line, the island of South Georgia is surrounded by properly polar water. The seas around the Falklands are just as full of food for penguins, so New Island’s gentoos would have it easy, compared with their South Georgian cousins, if it were not for one thing – one animal, in fact – not even one species but a single individual: a male sea lion.

  The gentoos’ nests are packed together in a smelly, noisy colony above the beach. They are quite safe ashore because there are no land mammals and providing the penguins keep their (albeit rather limited) wits about them, they can see off the few predatory birds: particularly striated caracaras. These are mischievous and known locally, without much affection, as Johnny Rooks. What happens to the penguins in the sea is another matter and it’s why the three of us – Matt, Justin and I – have bumped our way here in an ancient Land Rover belonging to Tony Chater, the man who owns this half of the island. He brings us to a halt on a ridge overlooking the beach. From this distance it looks peaceful and it’s impossible to know what dramas will be played out on its sands.

  We have three weeks’ food and water to unload, as well as our camera gear, then Tony shows us where we will be staying, in a tiny hut with bunks, chairs, a table and a gas cooker. Built onto the back there is a loo whose walls are filled with postcards from all over the world. Apart from our voices the only man-made sound will come from the generator we have brought to charge batteries. The view from the hut is superb: down over the nesting penguins to the sweep of sand and water, then out to two rugged islands with the open horizon beyond. Tony has shown us photographs of enormous waves pounding these beaches and cliffs. We are hoping to film penguins in waves like that. For them, coming ashore means taking the biggest gamble of their lives, and not just because of the wild sea.

  The outermost parts of the Falklands are quiet and isolated. Living here is going to be something close to bliss and, better still, this is one of very few occasions when my family have been able to come too. It’s a rare chance for my children to see what my job involves and why it takes me away from them so often. The hut above the beach is too small for all of us, so they are staying in a cabin a few miles away, sharing the tiny settlement with Tony and his family, the island’s other owner and some visiting scientists.

  Tony has been watching the gentoos on this beach for years. He explains that nothing much happens in the mornings, except that most of the adult penguins will walk down to the shore, stare at the sea for a while, then dive in for a day’s fishing. They hunt small crustaceans called lobster krill, which gather between the islands. Reaching them involves a long swim and the birds will be away for most of the day. Their chicks are well grown and they pass their time doing little except preening their downy feathers and waiting for their parents to come back. Like them, Tony says, we will need to be ready in the late afternoon, when the adults return with their stomachs full of krill to feed the chicks. He wishes us luck and rattles away in the Land Rover.

  Justin and I sort out the cameras and Matt starts baking bread. There are two thumps on the roof and an upside-down face appears at the window. It belongs to a bird the size of a crow but with the hooked beak of a raptor: the Johnny Rooks have arrived. They stay on the roof when I go outside, looking down at me from just a few feet away, full of bright curiosity. The pair look alike, dark plumaged with rusty underparts and a ruff about their throats, lined with the striations that give them their name. They have sturdy yellow legs and clawed feet and they are far more inclined to walk than to fly. They investigate everything in case it’s edible: a case in point are my knee pads, which I have been searching for inside the hut. The Johnny Rooks must have found them on the grass outside and they have been busy ripping them to pieces. The Falklands’ sheep farmers are no fans of these birds, not just because they harm lambs, but because they often steal underwear from washing lines. Given this reputation for theft and breaking things, I should have paid more heed to the warning of my shredded knee pads.

  A gale is forecast. Tony has pointed out that in a day or two the wind will be driving large waves onto this beach. We must be ready to make the most of filming the penguins among them, so on the first afternoon we sit above the shore to see what happens when the gentoos come back. The Johnny Rooks have followed us and as soon as we stop they run to our packs and start unzipping pockets, fiddling with straps and worrying loose threads.

  Tony’s description of what will happen next is spot on: the first penguins swim into the bay just as the dipping sun casts cliff-shadows onto the beach. They seem reluctant to come ashore and instead mill about beyond the breakers, sometimes raising their necks to look around. More birds join them, their wet backs rising and falling like a raft of floating tyres, almost hidden by the waves. We keep track of them by glimpsing the red of their raised bills and the white patches above their eyes. Still more penguins join the group. There is no sign of the hunter who frightens them so much.

  The beach is long and the penguins swim back and forth, always staying outside the breakers. They have almost reached the far end when, abruptly, they decide it is safe to enter the surf. As they do, for an instant, we can see into the heart of a wave as it curls high before
breaking. Inside there is a dark shape, travelling fast in their direction. It is much larger than a penguin, expertly using the sea’s energy and its long flippers to surf within the wave. The crest breaks in a white explosion and the sea lion is gone. In the bubbles and wave crashes the penguins will be swimming blind.

  They hurl themselves through the foam, scrambling upright in the shallows and running up the sand in a tight-bunched line. The sea lion has missed his chance but already a second group of penguins is gathering offshore. We glimpse him, craning his neck to peer at the birds across the wave tops and ducking under before he’s spotted. Most of the time he cannot see them and they can’t see him either, but both players know the other is there and they move like people playing battleships: second-guessing each other and forced to take shots in the dark.

  This time the sea lion positions himself well. The penguins know he is hiding somewhere in the shallows but their hungry chicks have lined up on the shore and they cannot wait for ever. When the group at sea reaches about 200, each bird judges that the risk of being caught is balanced by its need to be ashore and they turn towards the beach. Not one of them stays behind. There is an awful inevitability about the risk they must run every afternoon in order to keep their chicks alive. One chance of dying in a few hundred – they’re the best odds available and the penguins have no choice but to take them.

  The group swims into the shallows almost exactly where we last saw the sea lion. He’s skilled at ambushing them and he waits until it is too late for them to turn back before making his move. Then he surfs in on a wave, flattening his body to plane across the sand behind the gentoos on a thin skim of water. Most of the penguins have their backs to him, standing with their flippers raised for balance, slowed by the backwash against their short legs. As the first ones reach dry sand they run uphill with short quick strides. The last to leave the sea are directly in the sea lion’s path. He pulls his hind flippers under him and lumbers in pursuit, a determined muscular animal. The penguins panic, falling forward and beating the beach with their feet and flippers as if it was water, desperately scrambling away. The lurching sea lion is hardly more graceful but he is gaining ground. Halfway up the beach, pursuer and pursued are tiring fast. Both animals are insulated by layers of fat that now threaten to overheat them. The sea lion is close to his limit but with a last lunge his head enters my camera’s frame and his jaws close around one penguin’s body.