Eye of the Albatross: Visions of Hope and Survival

by Carl Safina

  Yet this morning the unrelenting wind has wound itself into a steady thirty knots with stronger gusts. The lagoon, wild with whitecaps, is conveying waves built to eight feet. The outer reef, where yesterday you could safely have paddled a canoe, is now a madly confused and snaggletoothed line of surf. The curling waves are continuously getting their heads blown off, the winds sending up twenty-foot curtains of smoking spindrift. The sky, darkly angry, is all astream with dismal, scudding clouds, and rain spitting like an angry cat.

  The wind begins gusting anew, and albatross chicks respond with vigorous wing waving and hopping. About two dozen young albies are on the runway, facing into the wind, flapping, as though awaiting their clearance from air-traffic control. One big Black-footed Albatross chick, the most advanced on the island—only a few wisps of down left here and there on its otherwise glossy new body—loves this weather. It stands wide-winged into the buffeting blast. These wings are long now, long enough to resist the air. A few steps forward, and one foot leaves the ground. This could be it—first flight! But as though the strangeness of near liftoff has sent a chastening chill into its adventurous soul, it folds up and resumes its vigil as if resigned to staying earthbound. Another starts running with open wings, very professional and adult-looking. Just as it tries to get airborne, it belly flops. A sudden slight gust catches another, swiveling it sideways. The youngster seems surprised by the invisible capriciousness of the world. But it gamely resumes hopping and running, letting the wind twist it this way and that, taxiing along the runway, turned suddenly left, suddenly right, like an aircraft with a drunken pilot.

  A Black-foot with remnants of a down collar jumps into the wind—and for the first time, for a mere moment, the wind lofts its wings, and its feet levitate from the ground a few inches. Exhaustion comes quickly from such new exertion, but this chick seems very stimulated—the newness of these sensations must feel thrilling.

  Fully functioning wings complete the physical bird, but there must come more exercising: toning tendons and breast muscles until they are tight on the sternum, capable of pulling those wings or locking them out rigidly in the wind for minute upon hour, tireless for a hundred—a thousand—miles. Getting to that will require more play. But by now the Rubicon of flight is a mere matter of time, and patience is an albatross chick’s best-practiced virtue.

  VISIBILITY CLOSES TO a few hundred feet, and sudden thick rain drives down upon us. The pelting raindrops sting, as though it’s raining frozen peas. The albatrosses turn their faces up into the rain, biting at the air, gulping at the raindrops, swallowing precious freshwater that they’ve been losing for weeks.

  Iwago and his crew make their retreat from the rain at about the same time I do. Inside, sitting down to a breakfast of rice and an egg fried sunny-side up, he gestures toward the open door with a toss of his head and says approvingly, “Best light. Dramatic. Lots of contrast.”

  The old barracks seems suddenly porous. Puddles are forming under windows and in people’s bedrooms. And now the roof in the computer room—the most secure room in the place—has begun leaking.

  During the day, as the storm pins us into the barracks, the Americans play Outburst and Trivial Pursuit, between mopping floors. The Japanese play Monopoly, Jenga, and chess.

  Shiway calls, “Brendan, you want to play Trivial Pursuit? We’ll kick your ass.” Brendan, ever the athlete, stops skipping rope and prepares to engage in competition. Shiway mentions, “I just learned a new word: peripatetic. It means wandering with no permanent home. We’re all peripatetic.” Their game consumes two and a half hours, a bag of chips, and ajar of salsa.

  Outside meanwhile, something like chaos. Waves in the lagoon slam constant white explosions against the bulkheaded shore. Suddenly part of the boat dock tears loose under the strain. It cracks to bits and washes away before anyone can react. The Gray-backed Terns, which are all nesting on the ground near the dock, are getting pounded by waves breaking over the sea wall. All their nests and chicks get swept away.

  Black Noddy eggs are blowing off their platform nests, onto the ground. A few Red-footed Booby chicks also get blown from their nests. Their certain fate: starvation. The rain continues all day, and steadily through the night.

  THE NEW MORNING’S air remains filled with a dense overcast and heavy mist at eight A.M. But the wind is down under ten knots. The front has stalled, on top of us. All the birds look bedraggled. Brian, the manager, looks bedraggled too. He got flooded from his leaky bedroom and slept on the floor in the communications room.

  The rain returns. The warm rainwater puddles become a thin guano soup, intensifying the colony’s rank stink. Brian and Mitch begin rebuilding a temporary dock in the downpour.

  The Sooty Terns’ smallest chicks—tiny enough to get under their parents and stay there—have so far survived the rain. The oldest chicks look healthy; even many of the soggy ones seem vigorous. But there is an in-between size: those fluffballs too big for sheltering beneath a parent but too small to be weatherproof. And today is fluffball hell.

  I expect lots of dead birds, and that expectation is met. Dead or violently shivering little soggy Sooty Tern chicks are everywhere you look. And the frigatebirds are indeed looking. Near vigorous dry hatchlings that have been well brooded (and stick close to good cover) stagger soaked, chilled, abandoned chicks, for whom death can now be the briefest suffering of their brief lives. One chick, soaked and upside down, is kicking in a struggle to right itself. With each attempt at standing it topples over, tiny legs scratching the air, little wing stubs quivering. Sooty chicks have brown-speckled antifrigate camouflage, but in the pelting rain the disarray among the terns enhances the chances for foraging frigates.

  The big frigatebirds are air-patrolling the colony, steadily snatching up Sooty chicks, terminating their short, unhappy lives with a quick-snapping final horror. For the Sooties, the frigates are hell from the heavens. But for the hungering frigates, the terns are a godsend.

  A frigatebird pauses and hovers near the edge of a bush. A Sooty Tern adult protests, and soon a flurry of wings ensues. With a dip of its head, the frigatebird plucks the tern’s chick like a plum from the earth. The chick vanishes in one frigate-pleasing swallow. For the parent tern, a year’s reproduction is gone in a gulp. Imagine a monster with a thirty-foot wingspan hovering overhead then tossing you aside as you try in vain to save your child.

  In just the hundred-foot section of tern colony I’m watching, frigates are lofting Sooty chicks to aerial grief at a rate of one every three to four minutes. Over the whole island, the Sooty chick population must be declining by hundreds per hour.

  The long, narrow, almost spindly cut of the frigate’s dark sails and their extravagantly notched forked tails seem almost designed to strike fear by mere startling appearance, like a pirate flag suddenly run up the mast of a rapidly approaching vessel.

  Now the frigates start stealing even from one another, suspending all pretense of professional courtesy. Any frigate mounting skyward with a chick too large for a quick swallow immediately becomes a target for a pack of thieves. Two frigatebirds lock onto a tern chick in midair, trying to pull it apart. One breaks free with the entire chick and immediately gets body-slammed by another swooping competitor. The one with the chick maintains its grip, but is driven to the ground in a confusion of tangled wings. The chick is at the upper end of bite-sized, and the frigate laboriously chugs it down on the ground while other frigates hover. The victor leaps back into action. In the next aerial fight the contested chick plummets into the sea beyond the wall, and a third frigate checks, wheels, dips, plucks.

  Another frigatebird takes a chick that struggles so vigorously it breaks free, falling thirty feet. It hits the ground unhurt. Yet now, 150 feet from its nest, this small chick is irretrievably lost, and the longest it can hope to live is a few days, doomed to starvation. But the following frigate, which has seen it fall and rushes in to take it, now commits an act less of pure predation than of euthanasia—saving th
e chick from a death worse than fate. Zooming in, it dips its head to snatch and swings up to the gulp. One fluid motion of terror and grace.

  In nature, things that to us seem good and bad are often two aspects of the same. But who would identify more with the frigatebirds than with the tern chicks? They say everyone loves a winner; but we root for underdogs. And here’s something I find odd: that among the weak we offer compassion, but among the strong we deride any weakness.

  Paradoxes: Shivering Sooty chicks who wander too near adults who are not their parents get swift pecks from sharp bills, but one adult closely regards a small disoriented chick, extending its bill to the chick’s nape in gentle contact. Many Sooty Tern chicks stand vulnerably under an open bush while several frigatebirds rest in the branches just overhead, showing no interest. At one point a bite-sized chick wanders into the middle of the runway. Utterly exposed, it has placed itself in easy sight of several hundred loafing frigates. It goes unmolested.

  Perhaps they are already too full to care, stuffed enough to forbear. Spectacular as the frigates’ plunderings are, only a small fraction of the frigatebirds—perhaps ten out of hundreds here—are actively hunting tern chicks. And though the density of frigates looks adequate to eat all the tern chicks, in reality the frigatebirds consume only a small percentage.

  Far more chicks are moribund from the rain. The weather is a greater and more wasteful killer. I see pipped eggs full of water, the bill of the dead chick visible through the hole it had pecked, which let in the water that killed it. Living is difficult, surviving is often a matter of luck. Those Sooty Tern chicks that will hatch just after this rain abates will not appreciate the luck of their timing.

  You wonder again how life can be maintained amid such abundant misery, such universal hostility coming from every dimension. Yet you see again that the grace, the acuity, the exquisite tuning of these animals all derive from so merciless a struggle.

  BY LATE AFTERNOON there is sun enough to throw the first shadow in two days. But the sun is fleeting, and soon the pattering rain again sogs in. Nighttime settles uncomfortably on us like a soaked blanket.

  In the darkness, an intense round of howling from the shearwaters startles me from a dream set outside a tiny church, amid the woodlands that as a boy I had loved and seen destroyed. But here on Tern Island I’ve found again that sense of spiritual home amid natural richness—not destroyed this time, but cherished and protected. The places for me that come closest to holy, that provide that sense of connection to something large and eternal, are places still capable of bringing forth an abundance of creation. These are not Edens. Here amid the profusion of life, the profusion of death remains always in view. Nests fail. Chicks starve. Adults vanish. Competition intensifies. Violence lurks. The animals are hunters all, sometimes of each other. Predation is the common currency; chicks are legal and tender. Here as always: the struggle to be alive again at dawn. But here too—and this is the point—enough balance and enough nurturing exist that species can maintain their presence in great abundance for millions of years, even as they are continually hammered and shaped in the stern, unmerciful forge of natural selection. The net effect, the final verdict, the balance of proof is the triumphant vitality, the bewildering plentitude. If anything can be considered “right,” this turbulent throng of life seems right because it works, durably and enduringly.

  RAIN AGAIN ALL DAY. Fieldwork canceled. The assignment board now says simply,

  Clean UP!

  Everybody does. The kitchen gets cleaner and more orderly than I’ve ever seen it. The entire living and dining area is crisscrossed with clotheslines that seem to grow like a spiderweb as load after load of long-overdue laundry emerges. Soon it’s hard to get from the kitchen counter to the dining table without numerous sheets and hanging underwear dragging across your face.

  Outside, the wind breathes not a whisper. In fact, there’s been no wind in the last two out of three rainy days. This weather system is still just sitting on us.

  Adult albatrosses, so hurried to leave in days past, are lingering today. At one point I count six Black-footed Albatrosses and one Laysan within a hundred-foot radius, more than I saw on the whole island when I first returned. They’d rather give the weather time to move than risk flying into dense rain and no wind. One Laysan Albatross seems torn between waiting and leaving. After feeding its chick, it spends seventeen minutes merely standing at the nest, then walks toward the shore. It opens and closes its wings slowly several times as though undecided, walks several steps with wings open, then folds up. It walks over to one of the other adults, sits, and accepts a few minutes’ neck-preening. But it quickly becomes restless, walking along the bulkhead, raising a ruckus from the Sooty Terns whose colony it is walking through. As if the protests and jabs from the Sooties are just too much hassle in this unpleasantly crowded neighborhood of strangers, the bird runs forward with open wings, and in a few quick flaps launches northward. It has spent twenty-three minutes ashore. In a few moments the albatross vanishes into an approaching curtain of fine rain.

  I hunch as I feel my T-shirt soaking through, then splatter and slop my way through the runway puddles. The albatross chicks look bedraggled but all seem old enough to have survived. They’re preening a lot. Rainwater rolls down their backs and wings, while the absurdly matted down on their heads and necks drips like soaked and matted moss.

  Inside the barracks, with all the laundry and cleaning done, the biology staffers are writing copious letters home. By afternoon, Shiway says, “I feel like I’ve written to everyone I’ve ever known and everyone I’ll ever meet.”

  There’s nothing left to do but cut hair. Before dinner, National Geographic producer Greg Marshall prepares to give his soundwoman (and wife) Birget Buhleier a haircut. She says, “Make it short.” But she’s a little shocked to see how well Greg follows her instructions. Birget’s hair had been down to her elbows. Now it barely touches her ears. Brendan receives a haircut so radical that people greet him by rubbing his head.

  The mealtime music tonight consists of the Gipsy Kings followed by Jimi Hendrix’s “Manic Depression.” Now it’s The Gentle Side of John Coltrane, including “My One and Only Love,” with Johnny Hartman, surely one of the most soul-saturated recordings ever captured in any musical idiom. While I’m inhaling Coltrane’s exhalations, Mitch and Melissa are preparing what Greg is already promoting as “a serious pizza orgy.” It’s going to be quite a night. A gecko lizard pours itself out of a small hole in the cement-block wall just behind Greg’s right ear. One or two geckos remain visible on the kitchen walls throughout the dinner hour.

  A Brown Noddy flies in and finds the kitchen counter an appealing resting pad. Its close observation of the food preparations brings little comment; we’ve all grown very accustomed to birds. This noddy’s behavior is testimonial to individuality among animals. I imagine that individual distinctions among people are as invisible to them as individual distinctions among wild animals usually are to us—that it seems to them that “all those people look the same.”

  AFTER DINNER, real blue appears overhead. The evening has gifted us the calmest sea and the most beautiful sunset of the trip. The sun, setting, glorifies the air with color. Billowing clouds are towering into a sky that grades from pale at eye level to a very deep blue at the zenith. The lagoon again tints the soles of the clouds green, while the cloud tops rise rose, peach, and gold caught from the sinking sun. Add a pastel-pink tropicbird as a beauty mark. The colors are all in fluid motion, changing as the sun drops. The visual is so stunning, the beauty so pumped up, it’s enough to inspire you to fly two thousand miles in it yourself.

  Even the runway—full of sheeted puddles—is reflecting the sky, somehow catching the lagoon’s green cast off the clouds as the first evening star appears. Catherine comes out onto the porch, spreads her bandaged, sun-blistered arms wide, and bursts out, “It’s so gorgeous!”

  MORNING. Storm warning. We wake to more rain. The fine morning that even
ing promised with a glimpse of blue, dawn has withdrawn. The wind has swung again and blown the cloud system back upon us. After yesterday, no one has much to do, so we talk, getting to know one another a little bit better as the day dreams along.

  Catherine, who graduated from college two weeks ago, is saying, “I had no idea when I wrote the application letter that it was this remote. I was just thinking about—you know—Hawaii. Right before I came out I downloaded pictures from the Web. All my parents’ friends and my nonbiology friends said, ‘Oh my God—what are you doing? You’re crazy!’ So I thought, ‘Oh my God! What am I doing? I’m crazy! But from the minute the plane landed I thought, ‘This is going to be great.’”

  Shiway Wang, whose black, shoulder-length hair is pulled back in two tight Chinese pigtails, says, “My mother was planting thoughts, waving her finger like this. saying, ‘Do you know any of these people you are staying with? Do they have a criminal background?’” She giggles almost convulsively. Shiway graduated with a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering but says, “I didn’t want to sit in front of a computer all day.” She rediscovered her childhood interest in the oceans while working at the University of Washington’s chemical oceanography department. “Suddenly I realized you could do something with the oceans as a career. And I thought, ‘You mean be happy and have a career?’” After Tern Island she’ll be going to Alaska for another seabird project. And she got notified today via satellite telephone that she’s been hired to work on penguins in Antarctica this coming winter.