by Carl Safina
“I NOW BELONG to a higher cult of mortals, for I have seen the albatross!” exalted the American ornithologist Robert Cushman Murphy during his first trip to the South Atlantic, in 1912. Being near these birds touches people with something so profound it seems spiritual. Returning from several Wandering Albatross nests on a subantarctic island one morning, one of my companions remarked, “I feel like I’ve been to church.” My first experience among nesting Royal Albatrosses on New Zealand’s Campbell Island had caught me off guard, too, seeming less like the expected visit and more like an audience with beings who did not merely occupy but somehow populated the place. They seemed to give the island its rationale, embodying the slow sweep of deep time in the splendor of their magisterial seascape. Before I turned my back to walk downhill, the nest inspection had become a pilgrimage. Being in their presence infused a penetrating sensation each of us later described with the same word: serenity. The eminent ornithologist Dr. Frank Gill, who has studied birds throughout the world, remembered this from a day observing nesting Wanderers: “There was such wisdom in those beautiful eyes that have seen so many years. In all my lifetime of experiences with birds, no moment was so moving.”
During their prodigious travels albatrosses cross paths with a spectacular array of creatures near the ocean surface, including other seabirds, fishes, whales, sharks, sea turtles, seals, and some extraordinary people. Following albatrosses will enlarge your life, and they will be sure to introduce you to the splendid company they keep; all truly awesome envoys of the magnificence of life on this ocean planet.
Amelia’s Realm
GREETINGS
TURN THIS WHOLE VIEW upside down, and it would look the same. There’s the blue disk of sky above, the blue disk of sea below, and clouds floating between. Simple and elemental, it’s a seabird’s world.
Beneath these bright clouds, a dark, limitless expanse of ocean. Flying over and through so much ocean and vapor in so small a plane, we’re being reminded that our blue-and-white planet takes its color from clouds and the sea, two forms of water. You can let your eye follow the pale circular horizon, or roam across the skies above or the sea beneath. The realm below is a barely ruffled theater-in-the-round, with us always at center stage under the dome of sky, no matter how fast or far we travel. I’m realizing anew that, when you stop thinking and just look at it, the ocean seems numbingly vast. The realization takes a while to build. It delivers a slow shock to your senses, leaving a deep impression.
It’s been several hours since the main Hawaiian islands melted into the tropical sea behind us like pats of butter in a hot skillet. Since dawn, with the sun rising higher and higher at our backs, our churning propellers have been pulling our five-seater west from Honolulu across five hundred measured miles of nautical space.
From up here, you can see patterns in the water. Intriguing patterns. Much of the ocean is simply a crinkled light blue. But some of the crenellated surface forms concentric whorls, like enormous fingerprints, or swirls, or fanning patterns being etched by breaths of wind. And lines of lighter blue run through darker expanses in long streaks, like stretch marks upon the curving belly of Mother Earth.
Over there, a line extending out beyond vision separates a vast area of lighter-colored water from a darker realm of ocean. That front, that boundary separating two very different water masses, hints at the great fact that rules the lives and travels of everything that roams and flows below: the ocean is not just a bowl of all-the-same water but a glittering, swirling mosaic of grand proportions.
AFTER SEVERAL ANIMATED HOURS of suspension aloft, a slight aquamarine smudge appears in that blue ocean disk. Slowly it begins attaining focus: shallows surrounding a wide, bright lagoon. An atoll called French Frigate Shoals—our destination. Waves are breaking lacily on a ring of reef about eighteen miles in diameter. From the air, the swells breaking themselves on the fringing reef look like a white pearl necklace dressing a turquoise throat. Dominating the Shoals’ central lagoon stands a spectacular rock rampart an eighth of a mile long and seven hundred feet high, sharpened on both ends like an ax. This is La Pérouse Pinnacle, remnant neck of this ancient atoll’s parent volcano.
We’re descending. The surrounding Pacific, in its gentle swell and subsidence, looks as calm as a napping cat. The forereef comes up quickly from true abyss, miles deep, taking the water from deep cobalt to jade green, then to white breakers. On the surf-scoured reef crest, the corals look beige. They’re broken into tongue-and-groove formations, as though the waves in their perpetual thrusting and withdrawing have raked their fingernails across the reef.
Just inside the corals corralling the lagoon, the bottom lightens to lime-green flats, dotted by a few dark lava-rock patches. In places the shallows rise in low little islands. Some have green vegetated centers, surrounded by bright coral-sand beaches. Others, too flat and washed over for any growth of green, are all dazzling white.
AS WE NEAR the airstrip on one of the atoll’s islands—Tern Island—copilot Ron Lum dons a helmet. “In case a big gooney bird comes through the windshield,” he says as he tightens the strap. “Or,” Lum laughs, “in case the pilot gets killed while we’re landing.” For me and my traveling companion, the seabird scientist Dr. David Anderson, there are no helmets.
Pilot Bob Justman doesn’t reply. He’s busy concentrating on making the helmet unnecessary.
The coolness aloft changes abruptly as we near the planet’s surface and the greenhouse effect takes hold inside our glassed-in passenger compartment. It’s an impressive demonstration that just a thin veil of survivable warmth blankets Earth’s surface. The thinnest soap bubble holds all known life.
Swiftly approaching the unpaved runway for landing, Justman says, “Uh-oh, birds are taking off from the southeast.”
An astonishing swarm of seabirds rises into the air on both sides of us. Because of the crosswind, many are flying over the airstrip.
Suddenly there’s a blur and a thud so heavy and direct on the windshield that when my eyes blink open again I’m surprised the bird didn’t come crashing through.
Justman curses. “Tell me how I could have avoided him.” He taxis the plane to a stop.
This is a tiny island; it can’t be much more than half a mile long and a tenth of a mile wide. I notice a hand-painted sign reading, WELCOME TO TERN ISLAND INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT. ELEVATION 6 FT. Tern’s also an odd little island. During World War II, the U.S. military took an eleven-acre islet, filled it to create a thirty-seven-acre island, and bulk-headed it to a T-squared rectangle, creating a kind of terrestrial aircraft carrier. Most of the “shoreline” is therefore a low wall of rusty metal, though some beach has formed, especially along the lagoon side. The island’s middle third is all runway, the outer two-thirds all bird colony and vegetation. At one end, an old military barracks now serves as living quarters and labs for the scientists working here.
But immediately, as the plane door opens, any artificial aspects of Tern Island vanish amid the din and dancing of courting albatrosses and the dazzling action of thousands of other seabirds. The first glance, the first sounds, the first whiff, say that everything is different here. Wow.
We all get out, squinting in the sudden glare of bright sun glinting off the reef-powder runway. Amid the creatures, and with water stretching away in all directions, your immediate impression is that you’ve arrived at the heart of creation. The next impression is that anyone who ever gets the opportunity to stand here as we are is breathtakingly fortunate. We’ve been here for thirty seconds.
This is a place of chalk pastels, of coral sands and colored waters. The lagoon surrounding this strand of land is glass calm, crystal clear. The clouds, tinted. It is quite as though those clouds are white canvases set up merely to reflect the purples and blues and turquoises of the sea. And everywhere—seabirds.
ABOUT A DOZEN PEOPLE, mostly scientists and aspiring scientists, are already here. They’ve been spread out along the airstrip, shooing the birds off for our land
ing. Now they begin converging to meet the two newcomers. A young woman, introducing herself as Melissa—first name only; very informal—says that the bird we hit, a Laysan Albatross, was merely stunned, had lost consciousness briefly, is awake, and miraculously appears unbroken. That’s a relief.
Then a twenty-year-old woman wearing a tank top and a faded pair of paint-splattered shorts walks up. This is Karen, carrying a dove-size seabird called a Brown Noddy. Our plane has killed it. Thousands of other birds are already resettling, back into nests in bushes or on the ground. But the inescapable irony of having killed one of the birds we’ve come so far to see is unsettling.
WE HAVE TRAVELED this long distance to study long-distance seabirds. Only the tiniest sliver of seabirds’ lives—on land, when they breed—is accessible for detailed human observation. If seabirds studied us that way, they’d do all their research in our bedrooms. We’d be gone from the “study area” for long periods, but when we returned they’d take detailed notes on how we put on our pajamas, how many times we turn during sleep, and more about our mating habits than might seem proper. That’s how it’s been with scientific study of many marine animals; we study them on land or haul them onto the decks of boats, because we are incapable of following them where they really live, in the sea. This is changing. By attaching small, highly sophisticated satellite tracking devices to large seabirds, seals, turtles, whales, and giant fishes, a handful of people like David Anderson are discovering where oceanic animals really go.
Until recently, no one could guess where albatrosses went when they took to sea. Now, with these new state-of-the-art technologies, we can finally ask the most fundamental and elementary question: Where do they go? In a pilot study Dave discovered that the albatrosses breeding here may fly halfway across the North Pacific to find food for their chick. Now he’s come for a deeper look.
THE PLANE HAS BROUGHT everything from scientific supplies to fresh fruit, from liquid nitrogen for preserving blood samples to capers for dinner. While everyone else begins unpacking, Dave and I remain dazzled by the seabirds and the setting.
Among the people already here is Dave’s graduate student, Patty Fernandez. She is happy to see her professor, and broad smiles blossom. The relationship between adviser and student is almost parental, but—if it’s a good one—can carry the uniquely special dynamic only a mentor brings. You immediately see that this relationship is a good one.
An albatross flies in low over our heads like a light aircraft. Patty, with a sweep of her hand, giggles exuberantly. “This is so wonderful, don’t you think? I love working here.”
Dave replies, “It is wonderful. It’s surreal.”
As if to emphasize that Alice is now in Wonderland, that Dorothy has arrived in Oz, a bird called a Masked Booby—sublimely white with jet-black mask and wing tips—walks up on big webbed feet as if to welcome us like the mayor of Munchkin Land. Our odyssey has brought us to his embassy. Dave bows respectfully, as if meeting a foreign diplomat, and in a rather formal tone says, “Hello. Pleased to meet you.”
Patty waves a circular motion with her hand and the bird follows it intently with fixed eyes, its head going around in circles. She giggles again. We’re all smiling. You almost want to make conversation: “And how long have you been a booby—all your life?”
Birds are nesting on, adjacent to, and underneath the barracks. As we drag our duffels inside, I notice a little white Fairy Tern incubating its precariously balanced egg—no nest—atop the barracks’ permanently propped open front door. If you don’t like wildlife, this is a bad place to be.
Over our heads like a light aircraft—Laysan Albatross
We take a moment for better introductions with the people here. Melissa is Melissa Shaw, a veterinarian studying the health of the endangered Monk Seals. Her seal-research teammates are Mitch Craig, Mary Donohue, and Jason Baker. The volunteer bird-research interns include Karen Fischer, Frans Juola, and Laura Carsten. Anthony Viggiano is a graduate student. Soft-spoken, bespectacled, thirty-something Brian Allen is the manager of this station, and curly-haired Mark Defley is assistant manager.
Everyone—volunteer and veterinarian alike—helps unpack. When the cargo is unloaded, everyone goes for the mail, taking a spontaneous break to devour letters from lovers and loved ones, and to otherwise check the pulse of the distant world.
Among cards and letters, the mail yields treats. From headquarters, Dr. Beth Flint has sent some home-taped TV shows and movies.
“Who do I know in Bryan, Texas?”
“Trashy fashion magazines to lighten the workload.”
“Bills—for later.”
“Junk mail. Even here.”
“My grandmother loves me! She’s sent me a two-pound box of chocolates!”
“Has sent you? Or has sent us?”
Like the island itself, the barracks is a military hand-me-down (my door bears the words SICK BAY) from the days before satellite spying and long-distance atomic weapons of mass destruction made such installations obsolete. The U-shaped barracks consists of two parallel dormitory corridors joined by a large central room with a dining table, living-room chairs arranged for reading or video viewing, shelves holding hundreds of paperback books, and a large kitchen.
Living on Tern Island entails shared meals and shared bathrooms—just like family. Most people have the luxury of their own bedroom, but during the day almost everyone leaves their door open to the breezes. Many rooms are decorated college-style, with posters of animals or a teddy bear on the bed.
This outpost of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service does not enjoy lush funding. The plain interior is in some disrepair. Most bedrooms now lack electricity. Some toilets don’t work. But the available budget is wisely focused on the part of the operation that gets the work done. Supplies for scientific work and medical emergencies are well stocked and highly organized. The computer room is modern and air-conditioned, and communications with the mainland function flawlessly. Silent, clean solar panels have replaced the roaring generators that so afflict most field stations. One theme runs through everything here: devotion to the wildlife.
ONCE WE GET SETTLED, Patty leads Dave and me on a brief tour. Energetic Anthony, dark-eyed, with short, dark hair, comes with us. Patty’s been here for a month, scoping out albatrosses to carry the tracking devices that will let us follow their at-sea travels. This is Patty’s first big research project, and she knows that if she pays attention and works hard, it will earn her a master’s degree and launch a career. Patty and Dave make a contrasting duo: Dave, in his early forties, is tall. Patty is a compact young woman. He’s clearly of European ancestry. Patty’s facial features speak strongly of Native South American roots. Dave is bearded; he’s wearing his Wake Forest University cap to ward the tropic sun from his otherwise bare head. Patty’s hair is long and Inca-thick and midnight-black. Dave is much the professor, careful of word and clear of pronunciation. Patty, having studied in the United States only about a year, retains enough of her native Ecuadorian accent to make the simplest things she says sound charming.
Though it’s just after New Year’s, it’s hot here. But this great city of birds provides ample distraction from the heat. Over the barracks, Red-tailed Tropicbirds so pearly they seem to glow are hovering and backing up in the breeze, displaying their superb tail streamers to each other, shifting them first to one side then the other, calling attention to their slender, exquisite elegance. These displays are supposed to look sexy, and, well, all I can say is—it works for me. On the ground you can see that their gleaming white bodies are infused with a peachy bloom, offset by striking black feet and a black stripe that passes through their eyes and then curls to a stunning comma, as if the Red-tail is some mythic Egyptian creature.
We walk along the airstrip—the only place on the island reserved for people. Sleek, flit-fluttering, dove-sized Black Noddies create perpetual-motion commuter air traffic at eye level, carrying seaweed for new nests. They crowd the leathery-leaved Beach Heliotrop
e and Naupaka bushes like big figs, making the branches seem fruit-laden. Upon landing, they invariably open their mouths to flash their bright red-orange tongues and oral interiors. How very odd. The gesture must convey something important enough to say constantly. They let you close enough to admire their ashy crown and the white eyeliner around the trailing edge of their eyes.
While Black Noddies nest in bushes, barely bigger Brown Noddies nest on the ground. While Blacks are hyper, Browns seem quiet, reserved, going along and getting along. All these subtle differences and little puzzles that mark the boundaries of closely related species offer abundant delights for eye and mind.
Most bushes are rimmed with crow-sized Red-footed Boobies atop their stick nests. Their most common colors—they vary a bit—include red-webbed feet, black wing tips, and powder-blue bills. A few Red-foots are a lovely creamy café-au-lait morph. If you move in close—but stay out of pecking range—you can see the subtle pink pastels at the base of their bills and the pink eye-shadow skin around their eyes.
Masked Boobies hail us from little pebble nests on the ground. These guys are incredibly handsome: immaculate white body, tail tip and outer wing feathers night-black, black mask, bright yellow eye with black-dot pupil, bright yellow matching bill. Their stares seem quizzical, a little apprehensive.
What’s in a name? Plenty. Names—especially a name like boobies— impart bias. Temperate-region members of the same family are called gannets, and everyone thinks they’re oh-so-graceful—which they are—and that their diving skill is wow-how-spectacular. Which it is. Tropical members of the family—equally graceful and spectacular—are called boobies, and everyone titters and thinks they’re amusing. These birds misnamed boobies are hard-driving, plunge-diving, weapon-tipped missiles built to kill. Their stout, straight, sharp, serrated bills inflict real damage to any flesh, be it a flyingfish or a hand. Around here, boobies get respect.
