Eye of the Albatross: Visions of Hope and Survival

by Carl Safina

  And they’re not just going through the steps. During these dances they can seem truly carried away, like holy rollers, whirling dervishes. These birds are globe-trotting athletes, and they dance with Olympian energy. Everything in the dancing is about displaying quality, paying close attention to each other’s motions, instantly matching their partner’s movements. Speed, coordination, synchrony. They may be saying in effect, “I’m healthy and vigorous; look at how fast I can do this,” or “Look at me; the sleek, strong feathers I have for flying make me a reliable food getter.” It’s all about showing and assessing health, vigor, and prime condition. Can you keep up with me? Are you fast? Can you cut it with me? Can I cut it with you? Are you worthy of my offspring and the best years of my long life?

  Laysan and Black-footed Albatrosses are more varied and faster dancers than all other albatrosses. Dances may last fifteen minutes. They are highly dynamic performances; unlike the stereotyped courtship in many birds, no two albatross dances are the same. Most dances end with slowing pace followed by bowing, and then the female wandering off. After the dance they may sit quietly together for a while, then dance with another bird. Most dances are between a male and a female. Some—less than to percent—involve threesomes or small groups, and two females will dance together occasionally; two males, rarely. Prospecting females may spend a third of their time ashore dancing. Wandering and Royal Albatross dances involve full extension and display of both enormous wings, something not done by smaller albatrosses with lesser spans to boast. Sooty and Light-mantled Sooty Albatrosses (which have been called the Siamese cats of the bird world for their lovely shading) do much of their courtship aloft, during beautifully synchronized flights. They are gracile and exquisitely elegant birds; even among albatrosses, superb forms of life.

  ALBATROSS COURTSHIP is almost certainly the most intricate courtship of any nonhuman being. The reason is that there’s a lot at stake. The pair-bond and relationship must last years. The commitment implied is immense. Compared to other animals, an albatross does not get very many chances to breed, and each breeding attempt, each egg, is highly valuable and expensive. Albatrosses can lay only one egg in a season, and many cannot nest every year. Unless your mate invests extraordinary effort, your chick dies. If you’re going to put your only egg in somebody else’s basket and sit there for weeks waiting for them to return, you want confidence that they’re committed. If you want them to come from thousands of miles away, after weeks at sea, and feed your chick, you want to know they’re committed. If you’re considering a marriage that may last several decades, you want to feel sure they’re committed.

  So albatross courtship is highly complex. It involves both sexes very actively rather than just a male doing most of the displaying. And they don’t rush into anything. The mutual wooing may last months or years. Females want to be sure males will feel invested enough to return; males want to be sure the chicks they invest in are their own. But consider this: all males in a sense care for young that are not their own, because all males incubate eggs produced by a female, not by them. This trivial truism has repercussions that wrap the ends of the Earth: the great dilemma of being male is uncertainty of paternity. Result: much of male psychology is geared toward aggressiveness designed ultimately to accumulate rank and territory necessary to attract mates, depose rivals, and ensure fertilization of females and creation of genetic heirs. This is true across species, order, class, and phylum. It’s true among tropicbirds, verifiable among vultures, beheld among beetles, done among dolphins. Perhaps this is the root of male insecurity, and the deepest taproot of male aggression and violence the world over. But consider also: among these albatrosses, nesting in these densities, it’s perhaps most surprising that most males do in fact incubate eggs of their own parentage, in the right nest, in the right place. For that, of course, they can thank females. Females do have a choice. And they use it. Here’s the dirty little secret of the many-splendored monogamy of most kinds of birds that “mate for life”: quite a few of them color outside the lines. In most species, females often try to get fertilized by males who are older and better established and hold higher status than their “mates,” because a proven survivor is the best indication of the high-quality genes you want your child to inherit. These same patterns and tendencies function throughout the animal kingdom; many birds—even some albatrosses—aren’t really very different from many people in this regard.

  Thus, elaborate, prolonged dancing is in a sense the albatrosses’ search for reassurance, their quest for a promise. At the beginning of courtship, females may respond aggressively (“Is this male serious?”). But after displaying with the same male for some time, they allow closer proximity, mutual preening, and eventually—years later—mating. Lance Tickell, who studied albatrosses for half a century, has written, “Over several years, the number of different birds with which an individual communicates will steadily decline until it is perfecting the language of … one partnership, distinguishable from all others. This synthesis of language unique to one pair is, through repetition, synchronised in that pair. The paradox of these events is that once … mutual language is so perfected that breeding can take place, much of it ceases to be used. Breeding pairs no longer employ the full vigour of their language because they recognise each other and continually reinforce their close relationship by contact and preening.” With the development of intimate familiarity, the dancing ends. Between experienced breeders, mating is usually a quiet act carried out on the pair’s territory with little or no preliminary display. Experienced pairs often breed together over many years, until one dies. Divorce is unusual. Most albatross species display exceptional fidelity; albatross pairs sometimes remain together for longer than two decades.

  WE HAVE ONLY a comparatively short time to get to know these animals. Already our first day is nearly spent. The sun is nuzzling the horizon, throwing long shadows. It’s a calming light. No machinery, no mechanical sound, no running motors rack this air. We await no loudspeaker announcements. No one gets paged. No phones ring. For virtually all of human history, this is how the whole world felt. The distant surf and even the din of birds frame a great overwhelming, underlying quiet now found only in remotest nature.

  Within this musical silence beats the rhythm eternal. The sea rolls in, piles up, crashes, withdraws, rolls in. The great living tides of migratory animals render their own seasonal rhythms. The various seabirds, seals, turtles—feathered, furred, scaled—each perform a different theme upon these shifting shores. Each reads its score, enters on its cue, and takes its turn as featured soloist, playing a well-rehearsed part with vigor and intensity enough to render the music of the spheres. What you see and hear is a perfected performance born of millions of years of concerted practice in the most competitive environment imaginable.

  It’s a perilous paradise. The vast majority of hatchlings and newborns of most species, perhaps 90 percent, never see their first birthday. But those that win a chair onstage succeed to remarkable degrees. Many of the nesting terns are rather old, into their thirties. Great Frigatebirds and even these little Fairy Terns may survive well past the four-decade mark. Albatrosses—they can live a long time; no wonder they seem to be looking at you wisely.

  Sunset is pulling the curtain down on this day. And so this enveloping quiet imparts a deceptive sense of peace, while each animal is pressing its limits to keep living against the odds. The calm that comes over you derives, perhaps, from the intuitive recognition that this is a scene that has endured, that underlying the frantic scramble for survival is stability and a long wave of slow change. The feeling this imparts is an overwhelming sense of things gone right. It’s difficult to comprehend the long lineages that have put us all here, what elder beings we all are upon Earth. But this atoll, this wildlife, these remarkable albatrosses, all provide a visceral sense of continuity from deep, deep time. Here you can feel that our intertwined stories began far into the distant past, and that—as Coleridge’s ancient Mariner implied
—we are kin.

  BONDING

  EVEN BEFORE the horizon began so slowly to lighten, Dave and Patty were already in the main room, prepping the ten high-tech “tags” Dave has brought.

  Patty asks me how I slept. I was awake a lot, enjoying the constant murmurs, purring, and chattering from the hundreds of noddies and the Fairy Terns nesting just outside the dorm windows, and from thousands of Sooty Terns who came in after sunset and overnighted on the runway. Now, rather than having singing birds as dawn’s alarm clock, the island is the quietest it’s been all night, because the Sooties have already departed to search their fishing grounds. Still tired from yesterday’s travel and the nocturne chorus, I could have used another hour’s sleep. But being awake here is better. Sometimes a dream feels real. Here, reality feels like dreaming.

  Dave shows me one of the transmitters. It looks like a robotic mouse, with a mouse-sized body and a long wire tail. A pricey little unit—$2,900—it communicates with satellites that zoom around Earth in under an hour. It’s the biggest advance in seabird tracking in over 150 years.

  On December 30, 1847, off the Chilean coast, Captain Hiram Luther of the whaler Cachalot shot an enormous albatross. Tied around its neck was a vial containing this message:

  8 December. Ship “Euphrates,” Edwards, 16 months out. 2300 barrels of oil, 150 of it sperm [whale]. I have not seen a whale for 4 months. Lat. 43° S., long. 148° 40’. Thick fog, with rain.

  The bird had flown 3,394 miles (5,466 kilometers) in twenty-two days. For a century and a half, this fatal fix remained the best record of albatross flight over distance—until the advent of satellite tracking in the 1990s.

  A transmitter weighs about an ounce, 1 percent or so of an albatross’s body mass, a tenth the weight of an albatross’s egg, a twentieth of the bird’s usual weight fluctuations during breeding. Dave remarks, “The birds seem relatively comfortable; they don’t try to take them off.”

  OUR MORNING PLAN CALLS for putting transmitters on several albatrosses. Our crew assembled on the porch includes Dave, Patty, Laura Carsten, and Frans Juola. Frans has already worked with hawks in California, Nevada, and Montana, and has volunteered here to get experience with scabirds. Laura, from Boulder, Colorado, feels inspired by nature and desires to teach biology—“to give something back.” A willowy young woman with lengthy blond hair, she too has come for experience working with wild animals. Her parents, who were never able to get a higher education, always wanted Laura to attend college. Now Laura has made them proud with a new master’s degree.

  I ask Patty how she discovered her interest in biology. Patty, now twenty-seven, says her father died when she was twenty, and a year later she started on the winding path of higher education that has led all the way here. In nearly perfect English she explains, “In Ecuador, to do anything, you need your parents’ approval. My father believed to study biology was crazy. He said to me, ‘Bad idea.’ He believed I should simply get married. No study. But my mom is really different. She always said, ‘You know right from wrong, now it’s your choice what you do.’ My mother is a really smart woman, and always wishing she had gone to college.” Patty has only one sibling, unusual in Ecuador. “My mother always said: ‘I want to take care of two children really well, and not more than that.’” She continues, “In the Ecuadorian system you must choose your specialization when you’re fifteen years old. I wanted to be a medical doctor since when I was little. But in high school we went to the place where they open the bodies. And it’s like a meat place, you know—really gross. I decide: medicine is no for me. In the university, I meet a girl doing her thesis on Indian use of plants for medicine and food. So for three months I go work with her, going to different tribal villages.” Patty went to villages so remote that getting in required a three-week boat trip. She ate tapir meat and monkeys killed with blow pipes and drank chicha, made from yuca plants. She learned that the Huaroni people have one word that incorporates everything positive, from “thank you” to “that’s beautiful.” She also learned that a woman like her—early twenties— might be a mother of five and considered middle-aged. It was, she says, “the most incredible experience of my life.” After Patty’s jungle adventures, her sights narrowed on field biology, leading her to Dave Anderson’s ongoing seabird work in Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands. Among other things, she learned that “working in the field is hard. It’s not like Monday through Friday and weekends off. You have to work; you have to commit yourself—but I like that.”

  THE MORNING SEEMS almost too cool for a T-shirt and shorts, but that’s what we’re all wearing. And collectively, we’re quite the fashion show: Laura’s shorts are spotted with paint. Frans’s faded blue cap is streaked stylishly with tern droppings. Dave’s unique shirt says BIOLOGY REEKS. Attention to the raunchier, uncouth, and unpleasant side of nature—which abounds—is one category of what passes as humor afield. (Advice: never dine with parasitologists.) There is attention to the fascinating too, which also abounds, and the surrounding beauty. I think this outwardly focused attention largely accounts for the way field scientists dress and look; they’re too enthralled with the world—too in love, actually—to worry about a smudged T-shirt. As we descend the porch steps, Frans says to me from under his filthy cap, “I think you’ll like being here at Tern Island. It’s the middle of nowhere, but this place is a little miracle.”

  The idea this morning is for Dave to supervise, Patty to affix transmitters, and Laura and Frans to learn how it’s done so they can assist later. Patty wants to choose birds nesting near the barracks, so she can keep an eye on them. And because this will be a study of the travels of adults who are caring for chicks, we need birds whose eggs will hatch. One way to check an egg is to “candle” it, to ascertain that an embryo is indeed alive. But Dave thinks these shells are too thick to shine a light through. Anthony, who has just joined us, says he’s used a slide-projector bulb to “candle” albatross eggs.

  So that’s what we do.

  The first bird whose egg we check is Amelia, the Laysan Albatross nesting just a few feet from the barracks steps. Her eyes are dark and deep-looking. She regards us as though skeptical, first with one eye, then the other. While I’m captured by the mysterious beauty in the eye of my beholder, Frans says, “When I look at an albatross I try to imagine what it’s seen and what it’s been through. I often think, ‘That bird may be twice as old as I am.’”

  These elder birds’ eyes shine with a knowedge of experience unfathomable to us. Even the broadest strokes of their lives have long remained the albatrosses’ secret. But we’re here to peer into that secret a little bit, to start peeling the layers of mystery. We’re not here to invade their privacy; we want to better appreciate them. And knowing about these albatrosses will also help us understand their exposure to human-made hazards, which may help us aid their survival. A third reason we want to know them better is to put the shimmering diversity of the living world in slightly clearer context, to gain a better sense of similarities and differences among us all.

  Frans steps over to the nest, crouches, gently pushes Amelia aside, and lifts her soda-can-sized egg. It measures nearly five inches long, three inches wide—too big to fit easily in your palm. As Frans stands, Dave instructs him to keep the egg in the same orientation and avoid rolling it.

  Amelia, who’d been sitting placidly, is now perturbed. She keeps getting up, fluffing out her belly feathers, and sitting back down. Feeling no egg, she keeps shifting. Her discomfort makes me uncomfortable, even though I know it’s only momentary.

  Frans holds the egg to the projector and puts a blanket over us. We can see the illuminated interior. It shows an embryo; we can see all the blood vessels. We can see the embryonic chick moving. Frans says to Dave, “This one’s a kicker.”

  In under a minute, Frans returns the egg to Amelia, who gets on it before Frans is even off his knees.

  Frans checks two more eggs. The third egg brings a moment of doubt. He says from beneath the blanket, “Hmm, ca
n’t see much on this one.” Pause. “O.K., there are some blood vessels; this one’s alive.”

  Dave announces that we’ll put transmitters on these three birds this morning. As he approaches Amelia, she rises partway off her egg and opens her bill slightly. Patty, with an index finger over her lips, is watching Dave intently. Wary of being bitten, Dave puts a hand above Amelia’s head and wiggles his fingers to distract her, then wraps his other hand around her bill and deftly scoops the great bird up, whisking her from the nest. Frans immediately shrouds Amelia’s egg in a towel to keep it from getting pecked open by a hungry Ruddy Turnstone or overheated by the sun.

  Carefully walking around other nests, Dave brings Amelia to the shaded barracks steps, where the transmitter awaits. He safely closes her bill with a rubber band but gives her a small stick to bite, thus keeping the bill open and aiding her breathing.

  A man’s whole thumb can easily disappear in her thick breast feathers. These albatrosses are nesting in the tropics, but they’re not really tropical animals; they’re heavily insulated against cold water. Dave shows us her brood patch, a bare bit of warm belly skin surrounded by thick downy feathers. If you were a chick, it would be a nice, cozy place to take a nap.

  Dave sits, situating the big albatross in his lap, facing her toward him. Amelia struggles a little and tries scratching with her feet. She succeeds, leaving the inside of Dave’s bare thighs painfully bleeding. Frans moves to steady her wings and feet.

  With an index card, Dave lifts several of the outer feathers on Amelia’s upper back. Patty takes special waterproof tape and lays a short piece across the underside of these feathers, then lays another short piece across their topside, so that the tape firmly sandwiches those feathers. Dave explains, “You want feathers that will remain in their normal position after the transmitter is on, so it won’t bother the bird.”