by Carl Safina
For Jenna,
who offered her couch
The spirit who bideth by himself
In the land of mist and snow,
He loved the bird that loved the man
Who shot him with his bow.
—SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” 1798
It is impossible to communicate to you a conception of the trembling sensation, half pleasurable and half fearful, with which I am preparing to depart. I am going to unexplored regions, to “the land of mist and snow,” but I shall kill no albatross; therefore do not be alarmed for my safety or if I should come back to you as worn and woeful as the “Ancient Mariner.” You will smile at my allusion, but I will disclose a secret … . There is something at work in my soul which I do not understand … a love for the marvelous, a belief in the marvelous … which hurries me out of the common pathways … to the wild sea and unvisited regions I am about to explore … . Shall I meet you again, after having traversed immense seas, and returned? … I dare not expect such success … . I love you very tenderly. Remember me with affection, should you never hear from me again.
—MARY SHELLEY
Frankenstein, 1818
Table of Contents
Title Page
Epigraph
PREFACE
PRELUDE
GREETINGS
BONDING
LETTING GO
IN A TURQUOISE MONASTERY
MOVING ON
A SMALL WORLD
WORKING IN OVERDRIVE
DREAMING AND DREADING ON ALBATROSS BANK
MIDWAY
GOING TO EXTREMES
TRACKS IN THE SEA
HOME AMONG NOMADS
LEARNING AND LUCK
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SELECTED REFERENCES
INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Copyright Page
PREFACE
EARLIER IN LIFE I spent much of a decade studying seabirds, mainly the fishing habits of two types of terns. I came to love them through the power of beauty and fascination combined, and by them I learned the systematic pursuit of truth that we call the scientific method. The place in my heart reserved for seabirds gets newly refreshed each time I’m at the shore or at sea, because they seem always full of grace. But beyond the visible, the unseen aspects of seabirds are astounding, particularly their travels.
Recently, I traveled with albatrosses through much of their range, asking them to reveal their world. The fraction of their lives that I saw—and what it said of the life we share—tells a story of struggle and hope and the power of sheer persistence and of life’s resilience. They taught me much.
The most renowned albatross species is the Wandering Albatross, and wandering the oceans was precisely my reason for choosing albatrosses as traveling companions. Albatrosses introduced me to many kinds of ocean wildlife. Along the way, I found albatrosses so continually remarkable in so many ways that I began not just seeing the world albatrosses encounter, but—in a subtle shift of perception—seeing the world as an albatross encounters it. And so, much of this journey is about the travels of one particular Laysan Albatross, named Amelia.
Most people recognize the physical beauty in nature; beyond that we tend only to see (and more often, merely presume) that life for wild animals is difficult and dangerous and short. I let Amelia draw me a map of her world so I could visit her country and its neighboring nations populated by other beings. From what I started seeing, it seemed to me that the basic struggles within the lives of many animals and of people differ mainly in detail. Though human societies have not solved the problems of our own violence and inhumanity, we tend to see—or imagine—the lives of animals as exaggeratedly brutal. Yet in some other species life can be remarkably stable and long, and rich with affection and tenderness. The main reason we usually don’t see this is that we have almost never asked another animal to show us what its day is like. I hope that you, as I, may feel awestruck by Amelia and her fellow creatures, see yourself as part of the whole vibrant living family, and feel inspired to help care for the soul of the world.
THIS IS A WORK OF NONFICTION, with one asterisk. The people, places, and events are true as I came to know them during my travels, and correct to the best of my knowledge. Amelia is a real bird. Where she went is what really occurred, and we know this because she wore a transmitter that told us her locations. The maps of her travels are made directly from the transmitter data. However, what she encountered and experienced is conjecture, based on the track of her true travels, on what I’ve seen albatrosses do, and what albatrosses are known to do. Thus Amelia’s travels are where she actually went in particular; her experiences during those travels are what happens to albatrosses in general.
One stylistic note: I have capitalized the species names of all creatures, because the adjectives in unfamiliar names can be confusing. For instance, if you read of a black-footed albatross or a magnificent frigatebird, it isn’t exactly clear whether “black-footed” and “magnificent” are visual descriptions of the bird’s appearance, the impression the bird made on the writer, or part of its name. So I capitalize Black-footed Albatross and Magnificent Frigatebird to let you know for certain that these are their species names. The general rule I’ve followed is to capitalize all the names of particular species; group names do not get capitalized.
Amelia’s transmitter battery eventually died, so we don’t know where Amelia is now. That matters less to her than it does to us. She doesn’t need us in order to be an albatross; albatrosses knew what they were doing millions of years before people appeared. But because people were born into a world that included albatrosses, we need them—to prove to ourselves that we can be fully human.
September 2001
Montauk, Long Island
PRELUDE
WHEN THE WIND DROPS in late afternoon, Amelia, already hundreds of miles from land, rises on her own power, flapping more than she’d prefer. With her breast muscles pulling on the long bones of her wings, those wings biting like propellers to pull her through the air, she is using up more of the energy she’s here to replenish. After rising on a small gust of breeze, Amelia lets gravity take over the work again, gliding downward and forward like a wind-driven snowflake. When her flight line dips, her wing tip traces a thin line on the sea, leaving her spare signature upon the waters. This evanescent track, the only mark of her passage, vanishes in moments, fleeting as her presence here in a body built to move only forward.
When the wind returns, she sets her wings and, without anything perceivable as bodily movement, continues for another hundred miles, flying in long undulations on the propellant energy of the breeze. Hers is the billowy motion of a life under sail. As Archibald MacLeish wrote, “A poem should be wordless as the flight of birds”; and so Amelia is a kind of living poetry upon the ocean.
THESE IMMENSE CREATURES we call “albatross” are the greatest long-distance wanderers on Earth. Big birds in big oceans, albatrosses lead big, sprawling lives across space and time, traveling to the limits of seemingly limitless seas. They accomplish these distances by wielding the impressive—wondrous, really—body architecture of creatures built to glide indefinitely.
The physics of an albatross’s wing differs from that of most other birds, whose bodies are designed for powered flight. That is because albatrosses are constructed more to float in the air than to fly. Compared to many other birds, which power flight with elongated “hand” bones, the proportions of an albatross wing are humanlike—long arm bones, short “hand” bones—almost as though humans were also meant to glide. Or as if, we
re we suddenly transformed into birds, we would most naturally become albatrosses.
Our physical parallels with albatrosses suggest our metaphorical relatedness. In Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the sailor who kills an albatross is compelled to wear around his neck the evidence of his crime against nature. Even two centuries ago, the bird symbolized good luck and beneficent companionship, harmed only at our peril—a seabird with power enough to convey a universal cautionary tale. Coleridge, who never saw an albatross, sensed this. We sense it still.
Many of us harbor a different metaphorical albatross within. Beneath the daily overburden, our truer nature is this wandering spirit on expansive wings, hungering for a chance to search new horizons, to hurtle along with the wind, taking chances, taking the world as it comes, making tracks that will endure only in our memory, forming our personal map of life and time.
AN ALBATROSS is a great symphony of flesh, perception, bone, and feathers, composed of long movements and set to ever-changing rhythms of light, wind, water. The almost overwhelming musicality of an albatross in air derives not just from the bird itself but from the contrapuntal suite of action and inaction from which this creature composes flight. It drifts in the atmosphere at high speed, but itself remains immobile—an immense bird holding stock-still yet shooting through the wind. Just as individual notes become music by relationship to other notes, the bird’s stillness becomes movement by context. Following your traveling ship with ease, watching you, circling stern to prow and back at will, it flies with scarcely a flinch, skimming wave upon wave, mile after mile. Watching it, you invariably wonder, How can it do that?
Exerting no propelling power of its own over long distances, it is driven by the tension between the two greatest forces on our planet: gravity and the solar-powered wind. An albatross’s flight relies on exploiting what all other flying creatures struggle to overcome. By working with wind and gravity, its flight surpasses all others’. That it holds still while being propelled by invisible forces may be why painters so rarely attempt the albatross, though it is one of the sea’s greatest conceptual icons. The author and wildlife painter Richard Ellis explains, “An albatross is motion, and capturing it is too daunting for most artists working in fixed media.” Indeed, watch an albatross speeding over the ocean to streak across your wake; it does not so much fly as pilot the great body it inhabits. Exquisitely so.
Albatross flight looks easy. You have no idea. A Wandering Albatross’s heart actually beats slower during flight than while sitting on the sea. Black-browed Albatrosses use no more energy while flying than when brooding a chick upon their nest. Scientists who studied metabolic efficiency in Gray-headed Albatrosses at sea discovered “the lowest cost of flight yet measured.” Here’s one of the birds’ secrets: for the long hours and days of flying, albatrosses needn’t really hold their wings out; using an extraordinary wing lock at the shoulder and an elbow lock for rigidity, they snap them into the unfolded position like opened switchblades.
The huge birds’ placid mastery of gales never fails to impress mariners distressed by heavy weather. Charles Darwin, in a tempest near Cape Horn while aboard the Beagle in 1833, wrote, “Whilst we were heavily laboring, it was curious to see how the Albatross … glided right up the wind.” Not far from there a few years ago, in a storm so great it stopped our 270-foot ship for a day, I too watched albatrosses somehow gliding directly into seventy-knot winds in hurricane conditions, circling our paralyzed ship with surreal serenity, seeming oblivious to the shrieking, spume-filled gusts. When the fascinated nineteenth-century sea captain Jean-Marie LeBris killed an albatross and held its wing in the breeze, the lift it generated so astonished him that he suddenly “comprehended the whole mystery of flight.” Later, in Brittany, he built out of wood and cloth a “winged boat” named, of course, Albatross. On a Sunday in 1856 his device was mounted on a horse-drawn cart and driven downhill at a gallop. The craft rose a hundred meters into the air—with LeBris at the controls. Modern aviation awaited only invention of an engine capable of powering such an aircraft.
While mariners marveled at the sheer size and stamina of albatrosses for centuries, the birds’ oceanic travels were impossible to cipher. Where did they go? Sailors speculated, and some came close. Scientists guessed wrong. No one could have fully imagined, because albatrosses exert almost unimaginable lives.
In the last few years albatrosses have been tracked by Earth-orbiting satellites, and their true travels outdistance all previous conjecture. Before maturing, albatrosses remain at sea for years, never alighting upon a solid surface, perhaps not even glimpsing land all the while. During their whole lifespan they expend 95 percent of their existence at sea—flying most of that time. Theirs is a fluid world of wind and wild waters, everything in perpetual motion. Land is little more than a necessary inconvenience for breeding. When they do breed, albatrosses haunt only the most removed islands, hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles from any continent. And even at the most isolated island groups, albatrosses often choose to nest on the tiniest offshore islets, as though they can’t tolerate too much land. When need compels them to return to a remote isle to feed a famished chick, an albatross may make round-trip foraging treks of several thousand miles, sleeping aloft, foraging in darkness and daylight, searching out food enough for a single feeding for their single offspring (a large, ravenous chick may wait two weeks for a meal). And so they span long stretches of space and time, distant from any shore, seldom within sight of a coast, embedded in the breeze. Doing so, they cover distances equivalent to flying around the Earth at the equator three times every year. A fifty-year-old albatross has flown, at minimum, 3.7 million miles.
Albatrosses are creatures of air inside and out; air sacs surround their organs and extend even into their hollow wing bones. An albatross’s entire skeleton accounts for only 13 percent of the bird’s total weight. You expect massive flight muscles, and again these birds surprise you. In most birds, flight muscle accounts for about 16 percent of body weight, but most albatrosses’ flight muscles amount to only 9 percent of body mass; in the great Royal and Wandering Albatrosses, flight muscle is a paltry 6 percent, with very reduced biceps. These creatures are gliding machines. More than anything, albatrosses’ long, narrow wings make them extreme-range mileage mechanisms. The ratio of wingspan to wing width of a Wandering Albatross is 18 to 1, similar to the best-perfected human-made gliders. Their wings’ lift-to-drag ratio—lifting force to air resistance—is a remarkable 40 to 1, more than triple that of many eagles.
Although exquisite at mining energy from the weather, the gigantic Royal and Wandering Albatrosses are gliding-adapted to a fault; they are incapable of sustained flapping flight. Calm weather leaves them stranded on the sea surface. Their existence utterly depends on the prospect that the winds will continue blowing. Fortunately for them, wind remains plentiful, at least for now. Indeed, albatrosses as we know them could only have evolved in the windiest place on Earth—the Southern Ocean, where an abundant supply of moving air breathed creation into Life’s most surpassing capacity for flight.
ALMOST EVERYTHING about albatrosses is superlative and extreme. Extreme in size, in duration, in endurance. Even the smallest species have six-foot wingspreads. Wandering and Royal Albatrosses wield the longest wings in nature—over eleven feet tip to tip. Wandering Albatrosses weigh up to twenty-six pounds—twice the weight of the largest Bald Eagles; that’s a very large flying creature. Wanderer chicks grow to as much as thirty-three pounds—larger than adults—before losing weight prior to fledging. After taking years to mature, an albatross embarks upon courtship and “engagement,” which can last two full years or longer. Royals and Wanderers first breed as late as age thirteen. Their single egg, which can weigh over a pound, requires more than two months’ incubation. Mates take shifts on the nest. Albatrosses whose mates fail to return may sit incubating, waiting, for unimaginably extreme lengths of time. If the mate deserts or dies, a bird may sit on an egg for two months, l
osing a third of its weight before hunger drives it to sea. One albatross whose mate failed to return faithfully incubated an infertile egg for 108 days. The death of a mate costs the survivor one to four full breeding cycles, because a new courtship takes years. Breeding stretches at least eight months; some albatross species require a full year to raise a chick. During that whole time from egg to fledger, mates may spend only five to ten days together. Many albatrosses breed only every other year; Light-mantled Sooty Albatrosses raise one chick every three or four years—the lowest reproductive rate of any bird.
The longest wings in nature—Wandering Albatross
For creatures with such extraordinarily slow reproduction—their exceptionally long reproductive lives constitute a life pattern closer to humans’ than virtually any other animal—the continuity of their race depends on equally extraordinary adult survival from year to year. Like a human’s, an albatross’s lifetime may endure for many decades. The oldest albatross found—and probably the oldest known marked wild bird—was a Royal still living at over sixty years of age. Some believe that the maximum albatross life span may approach the century mark. No one yet knows, because they haven’t been studied that long.
In addition to sharing similarities with us, albatrosses living so far from humanity increasingly share a human-dominated destiny. Because they range so far and live so long, albatrosses intersect and contend with almost every effect that people exert upon the sea. Forged in the elemental world of wind, water, weather, and other wildlife, the albatross inhabits a realm that has come to encompass everything from fishing boats to human-caused climate changes. Everything people are doing to oceans, albatrosses feel.
