by Carl Safina
The whining chick begins eagerly nibbling the adult’s bill with its own clattering mandibles. Its ravenous aggression seems nearly to overwhelm the adult, which at first tries to duck the advances. But the bill-battering builds, and this necessary food foreplay works as usual to stimulate her into regurgitating her delivery load. The adult hunches forward, neck stretching, retching. The chick, with sudden frenzied expectation, thrusts its bill up tight to the adult’s gaping mouth, forcing her wider and wider open.
Nancy remarks that the interaction has an almost sexual intensity.
The adult abruptly pumps out several thick boluses of food: semi-liquefied squid and purplish fish eggs, which the chick bolts down. Both pause. This adult is not Amelia, of course, but she could as well be. Then the chick renews its drive for more. The adult arches her neck and is retching, retching. Nothing comes. More retching. We whisper, “Is something wrong?”
Slowly, the tip—just the tip—of a green plastic toothbrush emerges in the bird’s throat. The sight is surreal—so out of place, so wrong, that my racing mind interrogates my eyes over and over: Are you sure that’s a toothbrush? Nancy is having the same slightly disorienting reaction of incredulity. The chick, oblivious in a flurry of furious hunger, presses.
With her neck arched, the mother cannot pass the straight toothbrush. She reswallows it and several times repeats the attempt to puke it up. Each time, she cannot pass it fully out. Nancy and I can barely handle the sight of this. It’s one thing to find plastic items on the ground and know the birds have carried them, but seeing this bird in distress, this vital mother-child interaction interrupted, is very hard to watch. It’s one of the most piercing things I’ve ever experienced. The parent albatross reswallows a final time, and with the toothbrush stuck inside her, wanders away from her chick.
IN THE WORLD THAT SHAPED albatrosses, the ocean could be trusted to provide only food, parents to provide only nourishment. Through the care bond between parent and offspring passes the continuity of life itself. That the flow of this intimate exchange now includes our chemicals and our trash indicates a world wounded and out of round, its most fundamental relationships disfigured.
The main message from the albatross is this: every watery point on the compass is now conscripted into our all-consuming culture, whether intended or not. No matter what coordinates you choose, from waters polar, to solar coral reefs, to the remotest turquoise atoll—no place, no creature remains apart from you and me.
Many of these albatrosses had already ranged the vast and open ocean for years when, holding my mother’s hand, I walked to my first day of kindergarten. Many were feeding chicks while I was fed the fiction that limitless oceans would feed humanity when we exhausted land’s limits. Many of these birds flew and knew the sea before it so filled with plastic bottle caps and cigarette lighters; before the strain of drift nets, before boats with multimile longlines laced their feeding grounds with hundreds of millions of tantalizing hooks.
To share close quarters among creatures that mastered a world so different—within their lifetime and your own—is to realize how abruptly we’ve changed even the farthest reaches of the planet. Unlike deforested or urbanized landscapes whose alterations plainly show, the ocean rolls on as always. But once you perceive the message of the albatross, the ocean’s deceptively constant surface no longer fools you. Once you see and feel the disparity between what animals learned to expect and what they now get—when you see over and over how traits and habits fine-tuned for survival seem turned against so many living beings—the world seems on fire.
Seeing a parent albatross gagging up a toothbrush changed my worldview. In my mental map, society no longer stops at the borders of shorelines, or of species. The world is no longer large enough for that. We’ve woven the albatross and the other creatures into our society. That creates a certain moral obligation. Fortunately, it’s an obligation that calls forth the most elevating and uniquely human qualities: empathy, foresight, compassion, generosity of spirit. The implication of finiteness is not merely of limits but also of potential, and the opportunity to create a better world.
In the oceans, less is truly more: less trash, less destruction of habitat, less contamination, less atmospheric disturbance, less overfishing would mean more life and more material and general well-being for us all—humanity and other creatures—in years to come. A rising tide floats all boats. Diminishment creates hardship for everyone. The oceans make our planet habitable, and the vast, multifaceted wealth of oceans spans biological, climatological, aesthetic, nutritional, spiritual, and ethical realms. We need the birds and the seas more than they need us. We need the life and stability and context they provide us. Will we understand this well enough to reap all the riches that a little restraint would engender?
Nothing could prepare albatrosses for changes that have come in the flash of one long lifetime. Our calling cards, in waters and upon the winds, cycle through all living things. In all the far reaches of the wide, wide seas, every single bird, fish, mammal, and turtle carries the trademark of human chemical manufacturing within its cellular tapestry. Antarctic penguins, who’ll never suspect that the world contains so many people, carry the imprint of humanity in their flesh; in the Arctic, among polar bears, some now suffer the deformity of having both male and female sex organs, the result of hormone-mimicking contaminants acquired in the womb from their mother’s food—from us.
But don’t pity just them. Quite a few scientists believe that endocrine-mimicking chemicals and other toxics cause various sexual and developmental problems in people, too, including the 400 percent increase in ectopic pregnancies in the United States between 1970 and 1990, the doubling in cases of abnormal testicle development, the increase in breast cancer, reduced sperm motility and lowered sperm counts, and low birth weight. And so at the dawn of the twenty-first century, 121 nations unveiled a treaty to phase out the “dirty dozen” of the world’s worst pollutants, exceptionally toxic chemicals that even at low doses trigger cancers and damage the reproductive, nervous, and immune systems of laboratory animals (including the pesticides DDT, aldrin, chlordane, dieldrin, endrin, heptachlor, hexachlorobenzene, mirex, and toxaphene, plus PCBs, furans, and dioxins, many already banned in the United States and some other countries but still used in Latin America, Africa, India, China, and elsewhere). Some scientists still doubt that humans are much at risk, but can anyone remain satisfied with having no choice in being part of this new experiment? No less than a mother albatross delivering cigarette lighters and toothbrushes, a human mother has no evolutionary experience with—and so no sense of detecting or avoiding—the pesticides, food additives, hormones, hormone mimics, antibiotics, PAHs, POPs, and other unsavory alpha-bits spelling trouble and signaling SOS to a world newly transformed by modern manufacturing and chemical agriculture. Like toothbrushes—but invisible—this hazardous soup comes between every mother and child. No nursing woman can avoid pumping industrial by-products into the pure new life at her breast. No less than in the sea, no less than to the birds, many of the new things affecting us arrive unrecognized for what they are. And so the albatross speaks to us of how much the world is changing, and how little difference exists between us—and of what it means to be kin and sibling in the net of time and events that enmeshes us all.
Four centuries ago, John Donne posited that “no man is an island, entire of itself.” Donne changed our self concept by weaving individuals into a social fabric. Four hundred years later on Midway, the albatross expanded upon this. Not only is no person an island, no island is an island any longer. Albatrossess inhabit only a few islands. Humans inhabit only one island, a blue and white orb of pumice surrounded by a soap bubble, afloat the great dark universal sea.
A STRONG WIND and intermittent rain has the albatrosses flapping, their wings waving, waving, waving. Some are preparing to leave, as are we. As we all must. They are reminding us there are other skies to fly in.
GOING TO EXTREMES
ON MAY
27 Amelia returns from a two-week trip after logging twenty-seven hundred miles. This trip was similar to the last in duration, distance, and course of travel. It’s the only time all year Amelia will seem to repeat herself. She’d sprinted rather directly to the southern edge of that subarctic front, taking only a couple of days to get there. At that point she slowed dramatically, her speed over distance dropping to one-quarter of her traveling speed. She began foraging the blended waters of the current’s frontier, working slowly eastward in the streaming edge over about five days, covering “only” about six hundred miles in that time, stopping frequently, lingering and looping around productive patches, and feeding well. Then she shot home in a long, multiday arc.
Now her big chick seems crazed with hunger. This is his last major growth spurt. His bones are a-building. And he needs enough reserves to make thousands upon thousands of thick, insulating, waterproof feathers tough enough to last a couple of years’ punishment in the salt and sun and wind and water.
The chick batters Amelia’s bill so aggressively that she almost wants to flee. But again his tantrum stimulates her to disgorge. The chick scissors in, quivering with excitement. Out comes the usual menu: squid, a flyingfish, finally a stream of oil, until Amelia is cleaned out.
She rests a few hours. For the moment, life is thick. Amelia’s chick is well past its most vulnerable time. If it survives the next few weeks—and everything suggests it will—it’ll be flying on its own. Graduation is just over the horizon.
But Amelia will not be attending. She’ll be over the horizon herself. Parents are forced to make choices. A chick’s gain comes at its parents’ expense, and eventually that price must receive its compensation. By mid-May, the porky youngsters weighed as much as adult males weighed back in November when they first arrived to breed. In late May, the chicks are 25 percent heavier than their own overworked fathers. For the beleaguered parents, this marks their low point in bodily condition. They’ve put a lot into their youngster, and it shows. At this stage, they’ve vaporized 25 percent of their weight compared to when they first appeared here for the season. Their reserves are tapped out, and they are within about 5 percent of their abandonment threshold. It’s time for them to take care of themselves.
Starting soon, Amelia will concentrate on bulking up again, until she weighs about what she did at egg laying. When Amelia leaves tomorrow, May 28, her departure will end her final visit for the season. As far as she’s concerned, her parenting is finished. In caring for her chick the last few months, she’s traveled over twenty-five thousand miles—the distance around the world at the equator.
AMELIA’S CHICK will receive another visit from his father. Then the youngster will face whatever lies ahead alone. His weight has risen more or less steadily since hatching, and now he’s at his heaviest. All that high-calorie squid and fish oil sits in him like high-octane fuel. He’ll continue living off it until he fledges.
With his parents gone for the season to restock their own depleted bodily reserves, the chick’s weight begins its first prolonged steady drop. His hunger pangs are his sharp taste of life’s no-free-lunch severity. It’s a harsh lesson toward harsher realities.
Even the healthy chicks are showing signs of intense hunger. One chick is trying to work on a Bonin Petrel carcass, pulling at the feathers in sharp tugs. It doesn’t seem equipped with the skill or know-how to rip the carcass open to get at the scant meat, or to place a foot on the corpse while pulling with its beak like a vulture. Yet its inept attempt indicates willingness to try eating just about anything. I see one nibble even the bare feet of a dead albatross chick.
Amelia’s chick spends a lot of time hunkering quietly, conserving energy and water, growing in place like a melon, all his new feathers pushing through his skin. In a couple of weeks when he begins really exercising his wings, he’ll need to be at the right weight, neither too heavy nor light. His weight loss is a finely timed free fall.
Amelia’s Travels May 13-27
AMELIA FLIES about a thousand miles north, and by the first couple of days of June she’s back in the subarctic front. Unhurried by the need to feed her chick—an empty nester by her own design—our long-range champion lingers a week within just a sixty-mile radius, thinking only of food and herself. For an albatross, this is practically loitering. For Amelia, it’s simply a little well-earned and much-needed time for Mom. She likes the eating, and she likes the feeling of putting on weight.
Eleven hundred miles away, Amelia’s chick is sleeking down and feathering out handsomely. Hoping to hear one of his parents’ voices, he interrogates every adult who lands within earshot of the nest. None gives him more than a sharp peck.
Over the next few days Amelia pushes away from the banquet and drifts about fourteen hundred miles farther away, into the western Pacific, then cuts sharply north, blowing past the subarctic front and pushing well into the Oyashio Current. Amelia penetrates the northern limits of the Pacific, into an ocean nearly devoid of night, pressing into the burgeoning spring like an early flower, following the warming weather up over the rim of the world.
WHILE AMELIA IS WANDERING like an albatross, in mid-June I’m back at Tern Island to see the end of the usual miracle. Everything looks different. At sunset you notice how much farther north the sun has swung compared to January. It quenches into the sea far enough poleward to silhouette birds bound for northern waters. You sense that the world not only spins but pivots. Only an ocean view seems to grant so planetary a sense of space. As always, birds make this a place utterly without stillness. Yet it’s full of the kind of grace that derives from a sense of time stretched into beauty.
EVERYWHERE DIFFERENCES, everywhere contrasts. Diversity and redundancy, tranquillity—and terror to come. Masked Boobies’ well-grown chicks sprawl so fluffy-white they look like little snow piles in the tropics, like big cotton candy—seemingly larger than their parents. Shearwaters and petrels of four species are breeding now. And the Sooty Terns are nesting—in, under, around, and between just about everything. Some Sooties are yet to lay, but so many have already hatched that the nesting areas harbor droves of chicks ranging in age from newly hatched to newly flying. Some Sooty chicks, left unattended, are sitting upright, but some lie on their sides with their heads curled around them, like little sleeping dinosaurs.
One albatross walks from its nest through a group of Sooty Terns so dense it seems impossible it could put a webbed foot down without stepping on them. It’s hard for us to avoid them, too. The Sooties stand ground with courage a lion would wish for, biting your pant cuffs, greeting with derision your mortal sole. Or, arising, they screamingly whack your head, setting your hat sideways.
Fewer than ten adult albatrosses are on the whole island at the moment. The rest are spread around the North Pacific. Surviving albatross chicks also seem sparse, compared to the numbers of nests six months ago. But at the size of big barnyard geese, the “chicks” still get your attention. Just a week ago they could barely stand upright. Now their legs are toned, tried, and true. They look so big and grown-up; day by day more and more lustrous feathers replace their woolly down.
THE PEOPLE HERE HAVE likewise changed. The bird crew now consists of two young women—Shiway Wang and Catherine Tredick—plus solidly built, curly-haired Brendan Courtot. Brendan has been here a few months, Shiway has previous field experience, and Catherine could be called green if she weren’t so acutely sunburned. Because this is turtle-nesting season, a crew of turtle researchers has also arrived. And because turtles nest at night, the researchers remain unseen during the day, emerging mysteriously after dark like nocturnal creatures, like the ghost crabs that also haunt the night-black beach.
In a few days two shark researchers are scheduled to come. Waiting to work with them are National Geographic film producer Greg Marshall and his crew. And at the moment I am sitting at the end of the island watching Japan’s greatest wildlife photographer, Mitsuaki Iwago, and his support team. Best known internationally for his book Sere
ngeti, Iwago is waiting so patiently for a Monk Seal to appear that a Sooty Tern has landed on his head. The presence of Iwago and the National Geographic crew emphasizes the world-class importance of this place to a much larger audience of people—underscoring that the wildlife are protected here not only in sacred trust but in a very public trust.
Hope is what we have to give, and work is how we show our hopefulness. This is in many ways an ocean monastery. All the animals coming here to breed are showing their devotion to the future. And the people are showing the same, trying by their devoted efforts to ensure survival for times to come.
OUR REVERENTIAL, almost prayerful presence finds no cosmic reflection in the meteorological conditions. The weather has turned manic and fickle.
Curtains of rain smudge the horizon even as the June sun has drilled a hole through the clouds. This sun no longer shines—it punishes. It’s infernal. Yesterday I walked the length of the island, less than a mile, and got a burn—a bad one—on the side of my neck that faced the sun. The outline of my sandal tops is sun-stenciled on my feet. As a result of her first day in the sun here, Catherine’s arms are brutally blistered and weeping, and wrapped in gauze.
