by Carl Safina
Freeloading is not exactly the right word for that sort of thing. There’s no free lunch. In the fine-tuned natural world, even free food can cast a curse. Some albatrosses and other seabirds become so preoccupied with following ships for all the free dining that they take longer to return to their nests, causing malnutrition in the chick. But the free food can be a good thing in certain ways; in some populations albatrosses are breeding at younger ages than in the past, and significant increases in breeding success suggest that birds are benefiting from increased food availability from fishing boats. For instance, South Georgia Island’s Wanderers breed about a year younger, and have 15 percent better breeding success, than they did in 1970. Yet in this same period the overall breeding population plummeted by about 25 percent and is still slowly declining. That’s because too many of those birds that have benefited from fishing boats are also getting killed by fishing boats—most on the hooks of longlines.
So there are pluses and minuses and trade-offs. But one thing we know for sure: before humans took to the seas, the world brought forth albatrosses in great abundance. Since then, many albatross populations have declined sharply, some continue declining, and some are recovering from past abuses. None, apparently, have enjoyed a net benefit from having met us. That’s a sad thing to have on our résumé.
In the past, when Amelia was following a boat in Alaskan waters or elsewhere, she and many other birds crowded closely as it began setting its line, keenly interested in the hooked baits streaming into the wake. This year, to lessen the chance that critically endangered Short-tailed Albatrosses will fall victim to the hooks, Alaskan boats are required to drag floats and streamers or “scare lines” while they’re setting the baited lines. Older, more experienced birds like Amelia find the new commotion particularly disconcerting, and they hang back.
Amelia has picked baits off longlines in the past. She knows the hook’s hardness in soft bait, has felt hooks scrape her bill. But for all the things she has experienced, never has she felt the hook suddenly catching, the line pulling taut, stretching her neck, pulling her under; never has she felt herself biting the stiff ring of the hook, resisting with feet splaying, wings not working in the push of submerging water as the tight line begins slowly sinking; the rapid doubling and doubling again of pressure, the water squeezing all the internal air, the pain in the ears and pain in the hollow bones; the need for breath and how for the first time air is not granted; the light dimming; the twisting and jerking of the head, the pounding heart and the whole body using oxygen rapidly, vision closing in until the slide into unconsciousness and the motion of automatic breathing returns, the rib cage expanding, drawing cold water into the lungs until all is still, except that the trip to the bottom will take a long while.
Amelia has seen other albatrosses, struggling, simply vanish. So in the wake of boats she senses a vague danger and is wary of the situation but does not understand how food can threaten. In all the world before, nothing could be both nurturing and deadly at the same time. Her world, like ours, has gotten more complicated, more perplexing.
When a major storm chases fishing boats from their grounds, Amelia lets its shrieking winds pick her up like a slingshot, shooting her southeast until she turns south again and hooks home.
Amelia returns on April 29. She’s logged another fifty-six hundred miles.
Only two weeks have passed this time, and the chick was recently fed by Father. Having survived its trials by weather and a scrape with hunger, the chick looks plump and healthy. But he seems frenzied with hunger, frantically pecking and biting at Amelia’s bill. Amelia waves her head back and forth, trying to avoid her own chick, yet standing her ground. Such pestering seems to remind her what she’s come all this way for, and it again gets her to regurgitate food. Even immediately after taking several feedings, the chick acts famished, pecking at Amelia’s bill, begging, beseeching, demanding more, more, more. During six and a half minutes she transfers even more food into the avidly ravenous chick. This was a pretty big feeding, 15 percent of Amelia’s body weight—like a 112-pound woman delivering 17 pounds of groceries and having her adolescent immediately swallow them all.
The trip to the bottom will take a while. (photograph by Graham Robertson)
Amelia stands by for another minute and twenty seconds—no longer. Then, while the chick is still uttering its squealing appeal for food, Amelia turns into the wind, spreads her sails, and with a few running steps is airborne. In less than half a minute she is coursing beyond the reef on the open ocean to the north, and in under two minutes, her bounding shape disappears from vision. After a trip of thousands of miles she senses no time to rest. Exigency enhances survival.
The disappointed chick, looking around as though still hungry, seems disillusioned to be abandoned so quickly. But it should appreciate Amelia’s hurry; some die waiting for their parents. Nearby, a Black-footed Albatross chick that was alive this morning has died. Its emaciated carcass has little muscle left on its breast. It consumed itself waiting for a parent that never returned.
Not far away, another adult has just finished feeding its chick. The parent leaves the nesting area and steps up onto the basketball court. Using the concrete court as a runway, it spreads its wings, running forward for take-off. But a wing tip nicks a pole. This brings the bird to the ground again, whereupon it gets stopped by the two-foot fence erected to prevent Monk Seals from coming up onto the court. The albatross runs back and forth along the fence for about five minutes. Nothing in its world or its evolutionary background suggests to it that it try walking back across the court and attempting again. Going backward would not occur to an albatross. For an animal perfectly attuned to a wide-open world where it can cover thousands of miles of rolling ocean on its own power, a chest-high fence becomes an impenetrable barrier.
This bird is taking longer to solve this dilemma than it took to feed the chick it came thousands of miles to nourish. I’m strongly tempted to intercede because of the unnatural injustice of the situation. But I’m also curious to see whether the bird will figure its way out. Finally, after ten minutes, the great bird takes a heroic running leap, waving its wings frantically. It gets airborne just enough for its belly to barely clear the fence. And immediately, it swings directly north, looking as though it intends to go a long, long way.
BY EARLY MAY, albatrosses with living chicks awaiting them in Hawaii are strung out on two-thousand-mile commutes to feeding grounds as distant as coastal waters within sight of California, the Pacific Northwest, British Columbia, and southern Alaska. Some of Amelia’s transmitter-bearing neighbors are actually in the Aleutians right now.
So I’m in Seward, Alaska, in a May snowstorm, boarding Mark Lund-sten’s fishing vessel the Masonic, to see what some of those birds are doing. Watching a perched eagle hunched against the driving snow on this bone-chilling evening, I’m wondering how birds from sun-seared Hawaii can really be here, in such a polar-opposite corner of the planet.
For tens of millions of years, albatrosses searching for food roamed seas devoid of boats. In the last few decades albatrosses have grown accustomed to sharing their richest feeding grounds with fishing vessels, and sometimes benefiting, but not without serious risks.
Mark Lundsten also knows about serious risks. He earns his living for himself and his family in the seriously risky business of Alaskan Sablefish and Pacific Halibut fishing. Lundsten is a surpassingly thoughtful man, and he spends a lot of his time thinking about ways to avoid three threats shadowing him and his way of life: the weather, accidents, and the well-being of the Short-tailed Albatross.
The Short-tail is the third albatross inhabiting the North Pacific. Even for an albatross, it is a large bird. The name is a misnomer; their tails are not particularly short. Consequently, this albatross is sometimes called Steller’s Albatross, after Georg Wilhelm Steller (1709—1746), whose name is commemorated in the Steller’s Jay, Steller’s Sea Eagle, Steller’s Eider, Steller’s Sea Cow, and Steller Sea Lion. Thre
e of those six creatures are endangered and one is extinct—further evidence of our hard presence.
Steller was a German naturalist with the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences who participated in the epic voyage of the St. Peter and St. Paul commanded by Vitus Bering in 1741—42. During a dreadful return along the Aleutians, the St. Peter and its crew were pummeled by gale after gale in an icy sea. The battered, leaking ship wrecked at the Commander Islands, seemingly dooming the men. Bering died, leaving the scurvy-weakened survivors to endure the bleak prospect of so howling a place.
They soon found an immense, slow-moving, previously unknown creature living in the shallows. Essentially a giant Alaskan manatee, it reached the astonishing size of thirty-five feet in length and twenty feet around. These animals plodded through the kelp beds, grazing the brown algae fronds like cows and snorting like horses, unafraid and unsuspecting.
The hungry men fashioned hooks on ropes. With these they attacked one of the placidly pasturing animals. The stricken creature resisted only feebly, possibly due to pain, but its usually slow companions rushed to it. “Some tried to upset the boat with their backs, while others pressed down the rope and endeavored to break it,” noted Steller.
Thirty men on shore hauled the giant animal onto the beach. Estimated weight: eight tons. The Sea Cow was perfectly designed for grazing kelp, but it had one fatal flaw: the people who found it thought it delicious. To their amazement, the meat resembled beef—they likened the juveniles’ flesh to fine veal—and its fat tasted like “the oil of sweet almonds.”
This strange new animal seemed sent by Providence to nurture the sick, shipwrecked men back to health. So inoffensive were these giants that Steller said he could sometimes “stroke their backs with my hand.” He further wrote, “In the spring they mate like human beings.” After “many amorous preludes” the female, “constantly followed by the male, swims leisurely to and fro until, impatient of further delay, she turns on her back … and both give themselves over in mutual embrace.”
Led by Steller, the recovered men built another boat from their wreckage and completed the mission. The survivors excitedly told others of the wealth of furs to be had in the Bering Sea and Alaska, and of the immense and gentle Sea Cows, whose meat was succulent and nutritious. For the next two decades, sealers and fur-hunting expeditions—over a hundred men—wintered on Bering Island. And many other vessels heading from Russia to Alaska stopped to kill Sea Cows for meat.
A Russian mining engineer named Jakovleff, sent to investigate copper deposits, saw that the killing couldn’t last. His 1755 petition for Sea Cow protection went ignored. Steller had described the animal’s internal organs and had weighed one’s thirty-six-pound heart. But the heartlessness of humans caused the Sea Cow’s final extinction just twenty-seven years after Europeans first saw it. By 1768, Steller’s Sea Cow was gone.
As was Steller. During his long, slow overland journey homeward, Steller became ill and died of a fever at age thirty-seven. His journal and collection of natural specimens reached St. Petersburg a year later. Among them were the “large gulls” that naturalists recognized as albatrosses of a kind previously unknown to science.
But long before Steller, Native American peoples of the coastal waterlands had known these big birds well. People frequently encountered this most coastal of albatrosses near shorelines, islands, inlets, even around river mouths. Native Aleutian people speared the huge birds from kayaks while hunting the island passages. And in the far north of the Bering Sea, hunters caught them at the edge of the sea ice. Abundant bones left behind in ancient Aleut and Indian middens on the coasts from Alaska all the way south to California indicate that this albatross was a frequent part of human diets. It was the most important bird in Aleutian people’s diets. Aleuts still hunted these albatrosses until the late 1800s, until the feather trade swept the breeding islands.
As University of Alaska professor Rick Steiner has so eloquently written, the Short-tailed Albatross is “perhaps the most stunningly beautiful of all the albatrosses.” While beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the Short-tail is an animal of superlatives. It is the largest seabird in the North Pacific Ocean. And it has been the most endangered seabird in the world; for years, it was considered extinct. The adult, as Steiner elegantly describes it, bears “a resplendent montage of color, including a distinguishing golden head, brilliant pink bill with a turquoise tip, a black ring around the base of the bill, wings of brown, black, and white, and pink and gray feet. Its feathers, some 15,000 of them on each bird, blow in the wind like thick fur.” Like the Wanderer, their plumage whitens with age.
Short-tailed Albatrosses originally ranged all the way from Taiwan around and across the North Pacific, past Japan and Korea and Russia, and from Alaska south along the West Coast all the way to Baja California. In the early nineteenth century, whalers occasionally brought Short-tailed Albatrosses to Edo (now Tokyo), where their meat was often sold as okino-tsuru (offshore crane).
At that time, Short-tails bred in legions on a dozen or so islands southeast of Japan’s main islands and around Taiwan. Among these, in Japanese territory, were Torishima, about 350 sea miles (650 kilometers) south of Tokyo; Kitanoshima, north of the Bonin Islands; Kita-, Minami-, and Okino-daitojima of the Daito group; Minami-kojima, Kobisho, and Uotsurijima in Japan’s Senkaku Retto group in the East China Sea, and perhaps Iwo Jima in the Volcano Islands. Off Taiwan they nested on the Pescadore Islands. In 1894, a visitor to the Pescadores wrote that the Short-tailed Albatrosses “absolutely swarmed” about his ship.
But Torishima (the name translates to Bird Island) hosted the largest Short-tailed Albatross colony of all.
Torishima was first settled in 1887, by about forty men and women put ashore explicitly to kill albatrosses for their feathers. At this grim task they worked diligently each year from October to May, while the albatrosses were nesting. When not so engaged, they eked out their living with a little desultory farming and fishing. The settlement grew during the 1890s, and by 1900 over a hundred settlers were making their living killing the birds. They built a light railway to move the birds for processing. They took their feathers, boiled their carcasses for oil, then dried them for fertilizer. Nothing was wasted—except the albatrosses.
In 1889, in the second season of intensive feather hunting, a man named Toru Hattori visited Torishima for three months. He observed Short-tails in abundance and described the human interactions: “The birds in the reeds have to be surrounded, but the incubating birds are very easily approached. They are killed by striking them on the head with a club, and it is not difficult for a man to kill between 100 and 200 birds daily.” He further observed, “At the approach of men they only clack their bills with anger but never leave the nest. We could not make them quit their nests even by lighting a fire in the nearby grasses, and they remained even though their plumage took fire.”
Hattori must have had mixed feelings, because the birds clearly touched him. “At a distance the albatrosses might be mistaken for fallen snow. When they fly up in the sky … they float in the air like white breaking waves, truly a sight more than wonderful!” He summed up, “After staying in this unique southern island with the albatrosses as my friends, I have felt an intimate feeling of attachment for them, with which I have written this.”
Each albatross yielded a quarter pound of feathers. The year Hattori wrote of his albatross friends, 39.2 tons of feathers left the island—representing about 300,000 birds.
The hunters were just getting started.
The Torishima settlement, which relied on albatross killing for virtually its entire economy, swelled to three hundred people. And the feather shipments in some years reportedly totaled 350 tons. That would have been 2,800,000 albatrosses. This was the time when albatrosses were under siege all over the Pacific, and the Short-tail was under brutal pressure in all its colonies. The distinguished Japanese ornithologist Yoshimaro Yamashina estimated that from 1887 to 1902 the plume hunters killed about five
million.
To the Buddhist way of thinking, they had been building what Rick Steiner referred to as “a great karmic debt.” The debt came due in August 1902. After the breeding season, while all the albatrosses were far at sea, the volcano exploded, killing all the island’s humans as they slept. This became known as “the revenge of the albatross.”
Heedless of any lesson, and admirably but unfortunately lacking in the superstition that might, in the wake of such seeming revenge, have warded away less practical minds, new settlers and fishermen came and left over the next years. And though the bird population was greatly reduced, when they came they killed more birds.
By this time, the Short-tailed Albatross had apparently been exterminated from all its other breeding islands.
Yoshimaro landed at Torishima in 1929. He saw about two thousand Short-tailed Albatross adults but fewer than a hundred chicks, and noted the people’s practice of taking the eggs. He wrote, “I saw with my own eyes the terrific slaughter, which I could hardly bear. Only the word ‘slaughter’ can express the sight.” He recalled Laysan Island’s albatrosses having been plundered by “phlegmatic and cold-blooded Japanese laborers” and added, “I hope to prevent any further such unpleasant occurrences in Japan.”
Slaughtered Short-tailed Albatrosses, Bonin Islands circa 1905, from a postcard (courtesy Hiroshi Hasegawa)
Yoshimaro Yamashina was a nobleman, a viscount with some influence. Good to his word, he returned to Tokyo and had Torishima declared a “no-hunting area” for a period of ten years beginning in January 1933. But the very month before protection was scheduled to start, the birds suddenly disappeared. The inhabitants attributed the birds’ disappearance to a storm. But a Mr. Fujisawa, the schoolmaster on the island, came forward and reported that during December 1932, in anticipation of the island’s soon becoming a bird sanctuary, the people killed over three thousand albatrosses.
