Eye of the Albatross: Visions of Hope and Survival

by Carl Safina

  Mostly, albatross chicks all over the island are sitting passively, shunting all their food to growth, wasting hardly a calorie on movement. At this stage they’re both pitifully homely and painfully hungry. Many a chick has been waiting more than a week for a meal, while its parents search the limits of the ocean for food enough to keep it alive. Even through their feathers, many young albatrosses look very thin. This is the beginning of their most difficult period, when food needs are highest and their parents are pressed to their limits trying to find enough for such large youngsters. Not all of them can survive.

  Peter points to a bird just ahead of us. “See how scrawny and small this one is? We won’t band it because it’s not going to make it. I suspect one of its parents died and it’s being fed by only one parent.”

  This very thin chick comes walking by us, pecking at the dirt every few steps. Nancy turns to me, saying, “Once they’ve died, you can detach. But I hate seeing them on that precipice of death. You feel it.”

  I say, “There’s a lot of pain in paradise.”

  Why do we discern in nature beauties of sufficient radiance to burn through the veils of such misery and horror? Is it simply that something in us resonates that our little blue planet has won the lottery of Life, and rejoices no matter what agonies that gift entails?

  Nancy mentions that a lot of chicks seem to have died in the last couple of days.

  Peter says, “El Niño probably caused food shortages that triggered the drop in the number of adults breeding and increased nest abandonment. Plus with El Niño we lost a lot of the breezes. It’s been so calm and hot that I think the heat—dehydration—is killing a lot of chicks right now.”

  Of the birds breeding here, Peter is most concerned about the Black-footed Albatrosses. There are only about one-tenth as many Black-footeds as Laysans to begin with. And in addition to other difficulties, such as oppressive weather and fishing, Black-footeds are having more problems with contaminants. Scientists expected to find the world’s most uncontaminated birds at Midway, because of its remoteness. They were astonished to discover albatrosses with contamination levels comparable to eagles and waterbirds around the Great Lakes. Black-footed Albatrosses—but not Laysans—carry enough chemicals to cause low levels of egg breakage and embryo death, reducing their breeding success by around 2 to 3 percent. But Black-footed Albatrosses can’t absorb more fatalities without entering long-term decline. Why these contaminant problems for Black-foots and not Laysans? The compounds called PCBs—whose chemistry predisposes them to affect fertility, embryo growth, immune and endocrine system functions, and cell growth—can be ten times more concentrated in sea foam than in seawater, because they bind to the fats in the foam. The flyingfish eggs that Black-foots so relish—they eat far more of them than do the Laysans—are basically bags of fat-rich yolk soaking in parts of the sea surface already enriched with contaminants. One more survival strategy gone awry. Another such example—one of the hardest things to watch—is albatross chicks dragging their long wings behind them, the toxic effect of eating lead-paint chips from the rubble of old buildings. Albatrosses of both species, and other birds, normally eat old eggshells, for the calcium. Yet again a habit that has always aided their survival sometimes turns deadly against them. Fortunately, only a few chicks are so afflicted. But together, these problems begin adding up.

  Of the hundreds of thousands of chicks that hatched, each night 300 to 350 of the big chicks die, mostly from starvation and dehydration. Each morning, a white-shrouded worker driving a little tractor and cart makes his rounds, using a sharp-tined pitchfork to garner a harvest of death. As if to affect a sinister anonymity, his face is hidden with a loosely wrapped cloth, his eyes obscured by sunglasses. He’s a grim but compassionate reaper, shaking his head as he stops to skewer up a bird that expired the previous night, saying in his Sri Lankan accent, “They get bigger; more now die. Not good.”

  More will die than will survive to adulthood; so you wonder at times whether the main process of life is dying. Yet survivors by the thousands await their sea trials. Peter tells us that more than a million albatrosses are now using Midway. Ninety percent are Laysan Albatrosses—over 300,000 nesting pairs of Laysans adults, plus chicks, plus one subadult nonbreeder for every two breeders. Laysans have proved very resilient over the years. The feather hunters had knocked the Laysans down to as low as perhaps ten to twelve thousand pairs at the beginning of the twentieth century. Then from the 1940s to ’60s the military tried to eliminate them from much of Midway. They bulldozed incubating birds, and at one point even used flamethrowers. Before military intelligence figured out that albatrosses won’t nest on pavement—and that they could just pave the areas where they didn’t want them—they killed 140,000 birds. They finally stopped killing albatrosses in 1965, but another 60,000 died in collisions with Midway’s poles, towers, three-hundred-foot antennas with their guy-wire riggings, and barbed wire. Lobbying on behalf of the birds had no effect on the military, but in 1967 satellites made the system obsolete. Only after removal of the antenna system (and final closure of the base in 1993), could the world’s largest albatross colony finally nest in peace.

  IN THE EVENING Nancy and I introduce ourselves to David Itano, a fish scientist. He, in turn, introduces us to a Fairy Tern chick named Tinkerbell who stands ready to fledge from the backyard bench on which she hatched. On Midway, this is networking.

  David Itano has a broad, open face, soft brown eyes, and features that reflect his Japanese-American heritage. Around here, he’s often presumed to be local Hawaiian,. David’s father, a biochemist, put the fishing bug in young Dave during frequent excursions around Chesapeake Bay and Marine. Dave would say, “When I grow up I want a job where they pay me to go fishing.” Mission accomplished. Dave’s current job is research into the populations and movements of tunas in the Pacific. He studies their travels by putting numbered tags into thousands of fish, releasing them, and seeing where other people recapture them.

  Dave has generously offered to take us with him for a day of tagging Yellowfin and Bigeye Tuna at a sunken seamount forty miles from Midway. Even at face value, this prospect would rate as sensational. Even more exciting is that these waters have been off-limits to fishing boats for about fifty years, because of the former military base. The place we’re going remains as close to untouched as any place in the open ocean can claim to be.

  As Robert Frost exclaimed, “May something go always unharvested! / May much stay out of our stated plan.” Tapping the same vein, Thoreau observed that a person is rich in proportion to the number of things they can afford to leave alone. A few places should be left to thrive unhindered, so we can have some means to measure the effects we exert everywhere else. How else will we be able to know whether humanity is becoming richer or more impoverished?

  Precious few places in the world could apply for the distinction of unspoiled. The place we’re headed for qualifies. What we’ll get a sense of is this: what a piece of ocean can be like when virtually no one has been there for half a century.

  NANCY AND I WALK toward the boat in postmidnight darkness. In the open areas around us, occasional Bonin Petrel chicks are fledging straight from their burrows. These young birds have never seen daylight, never yet flown. A young Bonin Petrel must—in one step—come out into the real world, find the sea, and begin its life-or-death odyssey of living, traveling, and finding food in the ocean—all on its own, all at once.

  We meet at the appointed hour and load the boat with the needed fishing rods, lures, and tagging gear. The boat is a cabin cruiser usually used for Midway’s sportfishing charters. The captain is Dave Wolfe. Rounding out the crew is mate Mike Meredith. Mike has been here only two weeks, and loves it. “For me, it’s the opportunity of a lifetime.”

  We leave behind the faint, quaint lights of Midway Atoll under a quarter moon, with Mars and Jupiter in uncommonly close consort. Running through the black sea in the ink of night entails the hazard of striking a drifting log or ot
her object, so we will go slowly, giving us about four hours to talk and snooze.

  As the boat is running, Dave Itano is telling me how much he loves this ocean. He first saw the Pacific when, as a teenager, his family moved to San Diego. “I knew I was home,” Dave remembers. He started fishing Pacific Yellowtail and bonito, and rockfishes in the kelp beds.

  We’re sitting in the boat’s cabin, relaxing with soft drinks. The last I saw of Nancy, she was “racked out” in a bunk. I presume she’s catching some much needed rest. Dave and I are forced to talk loudly over the engines, which are noisy enough to mask the pounding that Nancy is doing on the door of the toilet, inside of which she is locked.

  When Dave was sixteen, he and his brother fished commercially off La Jolla, California, from a tiny car-top-portable boat. “We located a hole right near shore that was loaded with beautiful big Vermilion Rockfish. We made twenty-hook rigs and pulled up full lines every time. We got about eight cents a pound.

  “But that lasted less than a year. We fished it out! It was my first experience of fishing out a part of the ocean. Whenever I go back to visit my family, I take that little boat and row it through the surf and fire up the kicker and line up the sights and get back to the spot and fish it—and to this day—thirty years later—it has never recovered. There were other spots that got fished out too. So that was a lesson.

  “In college I stayed out a whole semester just to catch Dungeness Crabs off northern California. Then the price plummeted to nothing. So that was another lesson: booms bust. Third lesson: there’s a place along the La Jolla shore that was made a protected park in the early seventies. It didn’t take very long for the place to start recovering. Soon you could find lots of small lobsters and Green Abalones in the caves and in the crevices. So that was another interesting lesson: leave it alone before you fish it out, and it’ll recover.”

  While Dave was in college, salmon were still a big part of the West Coast scene. “There were hundreds of mom-and-pop salmon boats. It was a very clean fishery. All hook-and-line. Very selective. Very high quality. Especially the big King Salmon—all banquet fish. Then in August we’d go far offshore chasing Albacore. You could roam the whole California-Oregon-Washington coast. I loved that fishery.

  “So,” he continues, “when I returned from college, boy, it was such a shock to learn that the salmon had collapsed and so many of those beautiful rivers I used to know were in such desperate trouble.” As a little aside Dave adds, “A while ago I was just hanging around one day in Honolulu’s Kewalo basin, just ‘talking story.’ We discovered that many of us used to fish West Coast salmon in the same years in the same places—we’d all been trolling the Umatilla Reef, and off La Push, or Hecate Bank off Newport, or Point Arena, Fort Bragg, et cetera. We started laughing when we realized that we were all ‘old farts,’ or old ‘futs,’ as they say in Hawaiian pidgin. But I’ll tell you, it was very bittersweet. It’s all a thing of the past, and none of our kids will ever see it like that or understand. The bright, hazy warm afternoons—I’d almost forgotten that they had happened. Sometimes it’s hard to remember how it really was. Then I remembered that older guys told me their stories, of how it was before my time—and how I’d said, ‘Sure, sure.’”

  Dave pauses.

  I don’t say anything.

  After college Dave saw the ocean from one of the first really big boats to explore for tuna in the western Pacific. “It was a two-hundred-and-twenty-foot, twelve-hundred-ton superseiner—with a helicopter and everything. Compared to the forty-foot salmon troller I was accustomed to, the seiner was a huge ship.” The fishing gear was a purse seine, an enormous curtain of netting dropped around a school of fish in a circle and then pursed together at the bottom. They fished waters off Samoa, New Zealand, New Guinea, Micronesia, and elsewhere. “We had amazing fishing power. Some of those schools were incredibly huge back then. We followed one school of Skipjack Tuna that was too big to get a net around, and finally it split in half. And then the half that we were following split in thirds. We wrapped the net around one of those thirds—in other words, one-sixth the original school—and bagged two hundred and eighty tons in one set. Most of these guys would set the net regardless of whether there was enough room left in the hold for all the fish. So we would kill, say, ninety tons of Skipjack in one set of the net for the sake of filling up the remaining thirty tons of room on board at the end of a voyage. The rest, we dumped.”

  Dave sums up: “So all my life I’ve fished; then seen myself as part of a big problem.” Dave figured aquaculture—seafood farming—might be the answer. “But soon after I entered the field I saw that it mostly raises delicacies for high-end markets; it’s not an answer to hunger. So after all these experiences, I think well-managed wild fisheries are generally the way to go.”

  Dave stayed with the tuna boat for three years, married an American schoolteacher he met in Samoa, worked five years as a Samoan government fisheries biologist, and fathered two daughters. “I was perfectly happy there. Nice people. It’s an easy place to raise kids. If your kid disappears, it’s because some big Samoan lady is giving her treats that you don’t want her to have.”

  But then Dave got offered a job in a large-scale tuna-tagging project based on New Caledonia. The project put serially numbered tags on a couple of hundred thousand tunas in waters of twenty-three island nations and territories over an immense area of the Pacific. “The tagging project showed that the tuna resources were vast, much larger than previously thought. That was before modern purse-seine fishing really got established in that region.”

  Dave then moved to the University of Hawaii to undertake an ambitious study of tuna reproduction and travels. By dissecting over ten thousand Yellowfin Tuna he learned that they spawn up to eleven million eggs at a time. And they do this every other day for weeks at a stretch. Despite virtually limitless trillions of eggs, the ocean is not overflowing with Yellowfin Tuna because the chances of a baby tuna surviving to adulthood are vanishingly small. In his current project’s first year, Dave has tagged nearly twelve thousand Yellowfin and Bigeye Tuna. So far, he has found that individual Bigeye Tuna remain at seamounts longer than Yellowfins. Roughly 9 percent of his tagged tuna have already gotten recaptured in the first twelve months, both in Hawaiian waters and at points north and westward—indicating surprising fishing pressure, even in so seemingly vast an ocean.

  This tagging project is what Nancy and I will participate in in the morning. Dave and I have a little while to catch some shut-eye before we get to our intended location. But when we go to turn in, we discover that Nancy is missing—not in her bunk, not on the bridge, not on deck. This raises immediate fears that she’s fallen overboard in the boundless black sea. So it is with considerable relief—for all of us—that we finally hear her pounding and discover she has merely spent virtually the entire multihour overnight run locked inside the “head”—where she remains trapped. In her defense we must note that the toilet lock is truly broken, that opening the door requires the combined force and mental effort of two men, a screwdriver, a chisel—and, of course, poor Nancy, who emerges a little bit dazzled with the countervailing sensations of alleviation, annoyance, and fatigue.

  AT FIRST LIGHT we’re in a different world: all water and one circular horizon. A few Sooty Terns were calling in the darkness when we arrived, and now we can see them flying here and there, and we can see a few Laysan and Black-footed Albatrosses working over the ocean surface. It remains fully impressive that the birds can find and relocate this precise spot within that great circle.

  A jetliner’s vapor trail provides the only proof of humanity’s continuing existence somewhere. Our deck is crowded with coolers, fishing gear, and a big blue plastic barrel. Soon after we left the harbor we discovered a stowaway Bonin Petrel on the back deck, hiding behind some of that gear. It was in a spot we can’t reach, and has now disappeared from view. A prepping table is loaded with fishing lures. The lures don’t look too much like fish; but they’re mad
e to move like fish when pulled through the water. Nancy is impressed with their garishness—their chrome heads and brightly colored plastic skirts. She says, “Some of these lures look positively lurid.”

  The quarter moon notwithstanding, we have arrived at our own sea of tranquillity. We’re over the Ladd Seamount, a submerged mountain that comes up as close to the surface as thirty-seven fathoms out of water twenty-five-hundred fathoms deep. A few tens of millions of years ago we would have called it Hawaii and sold T-shirts and surfboards, and it would have been about a thousand miles east of here. Now it has a higher purpose.

  In the east the clouds are turning gold and pink. The clear sky overhead seems devoid of moisture, but low clouds rim the horizon. Itano checks the instruments and announces what the albatrosses and other birds have already told us: “We’re right on the spot.”

  The air is moving at under ten knots—not quite breeze enough to sail an albatross. They’re trying to use the cushion of air between themselves and the water, but they’re also doing a fair amount of flapping. I wonder what they’ve been eating here.

  I’m surprised to see so many Fairy Terns this far from land. A couple of Wedge-tailed Shearwaters are also weaving along the ocean surface. At the moment we can see a few dozen birds scattered around. Dave says, “Keep an eye out for some birds to start forming flocks. They should start hunting soon.”

  Dave has readied two heavy fishing rods with big reels plus two heavy hand lines. All the line is very strong: four-hundred-pound test. To help get fish in quickly, on the back of the boat he’s rigged a hydraulic hauler of the kind usually used to pull up strings of lobster traps. He says when he first came to this seamount they weren’t able to reel the big fish in fast enough to prevent numerous shark attacks—hence the heavy lines and the hydraulic hauler. That sounds like a lot of sharks. Nearly everywhere in the world you travel, the main story you hear about sharks is how many there aren’t nowadays, compared to times past. This place, apparently, is different. Either big bold brazen fish abound here in profuse abundance or Dave is employing the most time-honored device in fishing conversation—exaggeration. We’ll see if they’re really here, and really so hungry.