Eye of the Albatross: Visions of Hope and Survival

by Carl Safina

  Flying south didn’t pay very well, so this time Amelia strikes energetically northwestward, covering over a hundred miles the first night. She’s traveling along the edge of that undersea mountain range where she foraged a few days ago.

  In the earliest slanting light Amelia is 156 miles north of Tern, and a little west. Led by a medley of aromas, her track weaving and wavering, she works a farther fifty miles along the submerged slopes by midmorning. Filaments of the wide Pacific currents curling around the island chain have formed drift lines at the surface, and schools of anchovies are eating plankton concentrated in those boundary lines where currents collide with local water masses. A few Sooty Terns and boobies begin hunting in little flocks over sparse schools of hit-and-run Yellowfin Tuna, nabbing the anchovies they’re chasing up. This place should produce.

  Amelia dallies, first heading northwest, then northeast for a few miles, then swerving north. This isn’t her best game, and she awkwardly trails the expert gymnasts, hoping to grab an anchovy or two already injured by a tuna’s raking teeth and skittering in hopeless circles at the surface. But the pickings are slim, the profit margin thin. It’s a pat economy of scales; the edge of endurance within the limits of survival.

  Sudden squalls and unusually hard rain coming from the north churn the drift lines; anything that would be concentrated food gets scattered and dissipated. For an albatross, this is no place to make a living. Neither she nor the chick is benefiting.

  Now Amelia abruptly changes course, heading northeast, flying 347 miles in just over twenty-four hours. Her track suggests that she may be torn by two conflicting drives: the urge to stay close and forage in tropical waters for just enough food for her chick, and the desire to go to more productive but much farther northern waters that would keep her away longer.

  MEANWHILE, BACK AT TERN ISLAND, trouble. Unusually hot weather has forced more albatrosses from their nests. Birds are sitting with mouths agape and feathers erect, trying to radiate heat. They’re very uncomfortable. This is not the environment that albatrosses are geared to thrive in. Normally, all would stay and brood the chick until it reaches two or three weeks of age and is capable of withstanding sun and surviving the chilling of drenching rain. Some chicks are already that old. But the heat stress is prompting quite a few adults to leave chicks unattended at earlier ages than normal. Amelia’s mate himself had felt relieved at leaving. Their chick, still young, suffers its first two days alone in a near stupor of blinding heat.

  AFTER JUST TWO DAYS AWAY, Amelia’s mate arrives at dawn. Then on February 19, as the morning swelter climbs to blistering, what occurs must seem like a divine miracle: rain.

  Heads tilt skyward as hot adults and dehydrated chicks bite raindrops, letting trickling water please parched throats. Bright droplets roll easily from backs designed to fend off heavy seas. No longer feeling the stress of oppressive heat, Amelia’s mate stays and broods their small chick, keeping it dry. Any unattended chicks are having their heavy down coats wetted with warm water. The rain plays a steady beat throughout the day.

  Steady rain continues throughout the night. By morning, the bedraggled chicks are chilled. The rain falls throughout a second day.

  Again, the rain beats through the night. By dawn, many chicks are moving slowly, their drenched down splattered and matted with fine sand. Most chicks whose parents have left are now shivering, suffering hypothermia.

  The overcast had been complete, but now the world further dims. Extreme heat is being followed by extreme rain. The weather seems haywire.

  The new, denser clouds are the wings of a water-breathing dragon. That dragon starts spewing a driving cloudburst. And now the sky seems to begin falling from its own weight. As the wind-slanted rain drives harder and harder down, the sea is building higher and higher up.

  The ocean swell has breached the reef, and the normally placid lagoon has itself become a battering ram of wind-driven waves and drifting foam. Those waves begin pounding on the seawall like they’re knocking at death’s door.

  Death opens to let the sea in. Salt water slamming over the seawall begins joining ranks with the already wide rainwater puddles, until much of Tern Island is awash. Branches, leaves, and other debris are pushed into windrows, scouring nests, as waves sweep dislodged chunks of coral well up onto the island. Colorful reef fishes, forced ashore, swim in calf-deep murky puddles on the runway. And suddenly the lagoon lobs a waist-high, fifty-foot-long drift log over the seawall. The log begins a slow, grim, wave-driven, rolling death march through part of the nesting area, taking out bushes and killing two young Red-footed Boobies resolutely clinging to their nests.

  Anything feathered that can fly is flying, flying in the water-whitened wind. On the ground—disaster. Chicks are being floated irretrievably far from nests, in water too cold for survival. Youngsters drifted and stranded far from where their food-lugging parents will expect to find them will die there. Drenched baby birds will continue shivering miserably until their movements slow to a stop. So many eggs of various kinds are floating in enormous brown puddles, they look like marshmallows in lakes of hot chocolate.

  Chaos rains. In this often sun-seared place where a little rain and a sea breeze bestow blessed relief, the birds have drawn too much of a good thing. Two days ago they were dying from the desiccating heat; now they’re soaking to a chilling death. Under the gale’s blustery gusts, rain plays drumrolls with its fists throughout the day.

  Throughout the night, the continuing storm keeps me semiconscious. I dream the power of thunder energizing birds and driving them in rain over black seas enraged by wind.

  THE FITS AND FURIES finish at first light. A third of the albatross chicks are dead. Their sodden carcasses lie scattered, or float drifted into lines along the shores of muddy puddles. They lie amid bits of wood and the innumerable foam drift-net fishing floats that the Pacific seems to be attempting to return to humanity. And while the albatrosses got pummeled, the Masked Boobies got it even worse.

  Amelia’s nest, just a few feet from the barracks porch, is just a few inches higher than much of the island. Amelia’s chick, just a few days younger than most, was small and helpless enough to motivate its protective father to linger longer. A little more resolute than many, Amelia’s mate just stuck it out. Amelia’s baby, just lucky, is alive when the last raindrop falls.

  Albatrosses that have been working hard to bring back food will come trickling home over the next week expecting to find their chick alive. But many will find instead that for them, this breeding season is history. Most of them will leave and not return here again this year.

  The Black-footeds’ timing gave them a critical advantage. Being a week or two older, far more Black-foot chicks were able to survive the deluge, and many bedraggled youngsters made it. But the Laysans were precisely timed for disaster when the rains reigned.

  Yet all the transmittered birds will find their chicks alive regardless; Laura and Frans rounded up their wetted nestlings antediluvianly, and revived them high and dry inside the barracks. The capricious compassion of science allowed these chicks to pull a lucky number, while at other nests, nature overran its course.

  AMELIA, NATURALLY, knows nothing of this. She’s been hundreds of miles away while the rains pounded Tern Island. Still at sea, all she knows is that she ran into some bad weather—nothing too unusual.

  During her 350-mile trek to the northeast she found too little food to make up for the energy she was spending. That’s what she expected. She was not wandering aimlessly; she was investing. Her trek took her across a wide area of very deep water, averaging eighteen thousand feet—some of the deepest ocean wilderness in the world.

  With this crossing Amelia has accomplished two things: She’s crossed into the subtropical frontal zone, where tropical seas mix with slightly cooler waters of the North Pacific Current flowing from Asia to North America. And she has come now to a vast region where the seafloor lies rumpled and massively corrugated with several dozen deep volcanic seam
ounts believed to have formed during the Cretaceous period a hundred million years ago from a hot spot beneath the then-young and northward-moving Pacific Plate. They lie north of the main Hawaiian Islands, running northwestward for about eight hundred miles.

  The surrounding sea looks simply the same as ever. The mountains below come nowhere near to forming islands. Most lie more than a mile beneath the waves, their peaks too deep even to pierce the darkness that entombs the surrounding seafloor, nearly three and a half miles from the surface. If you were rocking on a ship’s deck you’d have no clue about the seamounts far below.

  But Amelia does. She smells that earthy smell, but the scent is very faint. She sees that the blue water carries here a trace of green, but only slightly. This area holds more life than she has found in five days, but not by much.

  Yet here plays the music of the spheres almost literally, because these classic seamounts bear the names of composers: by prerogative of the oceanographers who mapped them in the 1970s, there’s the Mozart Seamount, the Tchaikovsky Seamount, the Mahler Seamount, the Verdi, Schubert, the Stravinsky—the Liszt goes on. Like the great composers themselves, the ancient volcanoes now lie silenced, slowly decomposing.

  Amelia has just sailed over the Rachmaninoff Seamount to the Debussy Seamount. Debussy’s La Mer is one of the most wonderfully ocean-inspired works of music ever composed, so it is fitting that Amelia is now in a sense Debussy’s guest. He’s a good host, and for a while he serves enough hors d’œuvres to make it worth Amelia’s trek. The currents striking the seamounts stream water toward the surface, enriching the region’s productivity and serving a nice dead squid every few hours. A connoisseur of calamari, Amelia likes hers chilled, and she isn’t disappointed.

  At sundown she is coursing the Brahms Seamount. She is not alone, and not everyone is here for the lullaby. Several swordfishing boats, nearly eight hundred miles from their Honolulu homes, are spinning their forty-mile longlines into this weak front of cooler water running over the seamounts. During the night Amelia sees the lights of two of them, many miles apart, but it’s already after dark and she does not follow.

  In the first sharp-angled sunlight of morning a single, rather hefty Flying Squid spurts from the water in a high-sailing leap, lofted oddly on its improbable fins. (Only a year old, the twenty-pound squid will soon die of old age.) When packs of Albacore Tuna surface briefly, Amelia, wheels and follows the streaking blue-gray forms, trying to maneuver in among their white bursts. But they aren’t staying up long enough. The young mackerel they’re after are too small and evasive for her, and she is wasting energy chasing between schools that seem always to vanish the moment she arrives. Only once, briefly, does a nearby mackerel school, distracted by their fear of the tuna below, press so near the surface that Amelia maneuvers herself perfectly for a slow glide over them. Without landing she plucks a fish before alarming the rest. It’s an unusually elegant maneuver for an albatross, and she doesn’t get a second opportunity.

  She keeps moving, moving, drifting 420 miles east, using a favorable wind to push her along the streaming frontal zone, searching for sharper definition to the front but finding only a broad, faint gradient where the life is less concentrated.

  So she turns south, moving two hundred miles the next day and nearly 250 more the following. Now she’s heading southwest, shortening the distance between herself and Tern Island for the first time since she left. By the time her big, clockwise trek brings her over the Prokofiev Seamount, she’s been at sea a week and she hardly slows at all.

  In the last few days, she’s been as much as nine hundred miles from her chick. She earns an A for effort, but in terms of food her trip has been only marginally successful. Once more she feels that chick pulling. The urge to get back overwhelms her hunger, but her hunger remains. This trip has not succeeded in putting any weight onto Amelia’s ribs. Convinced—but not satisfied—that the time has come, she sprints southwest for a steady thirty-one hours, covering over 460 miles. The smells of land and of the densely nesting seabirds help her to home in off a visually bleak sea long before she can see the islands.

  By the time she looms into range, Tern Island has darkened. But there’s moon enough to gleam the reef’s breakers. She lands amid the usual all-night din and bustle of birds. It’s February 25. Eight days ago, when she last fed her chick, it looked distinctly smaller. But its voice removes any doubt of identity, and Amelia delivers her high-calorie liquid diet.

  IMMENSE ISOLATION is typical of the great communities of seabirds breeding in dense concentrations on islands widely scattered throughout the oceans. Breeding remotely as they do, sheer inaccessibility had long been the best defense of such defenseless birds. At virtually every place they bred and in every corner of the world’s seas they roamed, for millennia albatrosses enjoyed the comparative calm conveyed by great distance from humanity. The world began closing in on them when coastal peoples started launching primitive but effective crafts against the sea. Beginning then, even their remoteness was insufficient to ensure an insulating peace.

  The Maoris arrived in New Zealand several hundred years before the Europeans. Their primitive hunting technology was sufficient to exterminate a group of endemic bird species known as moas, and they quickly noticed the albatrosses. The Maoris decorated their canoes with white albatross feathers, symbolic of rapid skimming over the ocean, and they used such feathers in their burial rites. They also used the albatrosses’ long hollow bones for awls, needles, toggles, necklaces, and flutes. With tufts of albatross down they decorated their hair and pierced ears. With hook-and-line they caught foraging albatrosses for food.

  When the Moriori people reached the Chatham Islands off New Zealand, about five hundred years ago, they began eating the nesting seabirds. They got a taste of their own medicine when the Maoris from the main New Zealand islands arrived and brought with them their appetites—for human flesh. Modern Maoris on some islands continue to claim a right to take nesting albatrosses.

  The first people to reach the Hawaiian Islands were Polynesians who made landfall perhaps as early as 200 A.D. Pacific legends tell of travels undertaken simply to discover the charms of another island’s maidens, but getting to Hawaii was no lighthearted outing. We will never know what drove the first human comers to Hawaii. Curiosity? Famine? Adventure? Defeat? And one can scarcely imagine the emotions of people who, after many days at sea in fragile craft, traveling beyond all limits of anyone’s known world, sighted the massive jungled coastlines of silent islands that had never before reflected light into a human eye.

  Despite their limited technology, the Polynesians developed more raw seafaring ability than any people that have ever lived. More than three thousand years ago, rudimentary craft and advanced skills had gotten people as far into the Pacific as Tonga and Samoa—roughly 2,500 island-hopping miles from the large land masses of New Guinea and Australia.

  But the Polynesian expansion was the most dramatic burst of over-water exploration in human history. At about the time William the Conqueror made a big splash in Europe merely by crossing the English Channel, a Tahitian high priest named Pa’ao had already logged three several-thousand-mile voyages to Hawaii and founded the conquering dynasty from which King Kamehameha descended nearly thirty generations later. A thousand years before Columbus screwed together enough logic and courage to sail away from land by surmising that he would not—as everyone in Europe believed—fall off the edge of the world, Polynesians had settled the most remote islands on Earth.

  Their spaceship was the voyaging canoe. As traditional navigator Herb Kawainui Kane has written, “Built with tools of stone, bone, and shell, assembled with lashings of braided fiber, and powered by sails of plaited matting, it was the finest product of any culture that knew no metals.”

  Even James Cook, widely regarded as the most accomplished mariner the world will ever know, was astounded by the Polynesians’ proficiency at seafaring. Cook stumbled upon Hawaii in 1778. His men were immediately surprise
d to recognize Tahitian words in the speech of the Hawaiians. Cook was awed. “How shall we account for this Nation spreading itself so far over this Vast ocean? We find them from New Zealand to the South, to these islands to the North and from Easter Island to the Hebrides.” (The Polynesian triangle spanning New Zealand, Hawaii, and Easter Island encompasses an area roughly equal to the combined surfaces of North and South America.) Most astonishing to Cook was the ability of people with Stone Age technology—no writing, no wheels, not even the pottery that usually defines neolithic culture; and no compass—to navigate the ocean’s most distant reaches.

  Amelia’s Travels February 17-25

  Polynesian culture had flourished unknown to the continental world for nearly fifteen centuries. The Hawaiians were in Cook’s time so populous that six of the eight main islands had more residents than they do now. (Median estimates of their population at the time of European contact range around 500,000; in a few decades, introduced diseases destroyed more than 90 percent of the people, shattering the dynasty.)

  European scholars for the next two centuries wrestled with the “puzzle” of the Hawaiians’ origins and routes. Most simply refused to believe that people with their technology could have actually sailed so far. It didn’t fit their idea of primitive. One hypothesis was that a great Pacific continent must have suddenly sunk, leaving the Polynesians, who must have walked all over the Pacific, suddenly stranded on exposed mountaintops. The dullest Eurocentric conjecture was that the Polynesians were the Lost Tribes of Israel!

  We know now that the Hawaiians almost certainly came from the Marquesas and Tahiti—2,300 and 2,600 miles distant—and it still strains Western imagination to think of preneolithic sailing canoes venturing over thousands of ocean miles toward no known lands.