Eye of the Albatross: Visions of Hope and Survival

by Carl Safina

Vanessa says that females with half a back flipper sometimes dig half a nest chamber, or one too shallow. “In that case, they end up scattering their eggs all over during the backfill, making a big omelette.”

  Julie guesses that about 10 percent of turtles coming ashore have shark bites.

  A little farther along, several confused tracks lead up into the berm and back down. Aaron moves along the dark beach, checking into each tuck and cranny in the vegetation with the suppleness of a weasel on the prowl. He sweeps his light. No turtles.

  But a minute later, amid lots of heavy tracks going up the beach, Aaron’s flashlight catches some sand being thrown. He glances the light at the turtle and says, “That’s number fifty digging a body pit. She’s been in and out for a couple of weeks.”

  The moon, now broken clear of any clouds, is casting a wide silver path on the lagoon. In the beauty of that lagoon, turtles are fighting for their lives against everything from predatory monsters to unseen chemicals to tiny viral particles acquired in polluted waters hundreds of miles away.

  We come to the end of the beach and step onto the runway. Those of us who have been carrying our flip-flops throw them onto the ground and slip our feet into them. We’re back at the dark border of civilization.

  LEARNING AND LUCK

  DURING THE FIRST WEEK of summer Amelia transnavigates the Bering Sea, looping and loping her way to the Pribilof Islands, squeezing between St. Peter and St. Paul, and bumping into the Aleutians’ Umnak Island on July 1th, Independence Day in the United States. It is independence day for the chicks who are finally flying, too, and after this revolution comes the real challenge of seeing how well the fledgling nation will survive.

  Amelia is also in a sense celebrating her own independence from the rigors of motherhood by wandering, with the single objective—when she has one—of feeding only herself. She has arrived in Albatopia, the promised land. It’s a realm of hungry salmon and runaway herring and clouds of baby fishes pressed near the surface by both their fears and their appetites, and squids squeezed into narrow island passes, lusting and dying in the heated passions of the short summer. It’s a fat, productive place, where sheer living abundance bursts the broad seam between ocean and land. Amelia lingers a week and a half, practically parking herself, making a slow counterclockwise circle a mere ninety miles in diameter. Just recently, crossing such a distance would have taken her less than a morning. Here she leisurely works the currents and fish schools and the krill swarms where whales are blowing, and she benefits from herring hurt by lunging humpbacks. She shares the view with flocks of sea ducks and skeins of puffins and dolphin pods. all here for the food, like crashers at a wedding feast. And though even here the water is warmer than it used to be and the pickings slimmer than necessary for some of the other kinds of animals, Amelia finds enough fish and squid day after day to fill the bill for an albatross.

  THE TERN ISLAND BIRD team has just completed its final preflight count of albatross chicks. It’s been the second bad year running. February’s rains, plus El Niño’s effects on weather, ocean temperatures, and food abundance, took a mounting toll on nestlings. Add to that: unknown additional mortality to chicks fed plastic debris; adults that simply skipped breeding because food was too sparse; plus other adults killed on longlines who never returned to feed their chicks.

  Fewer than half of the Black-footed chicks remain alive—far below the average 70 percent for both species. For the Laysans, the year’s a catastrophe. The several days’ difference between the two species’ nesting peak made more Laysan chicks vulnerable to the rains. Consequently, the Laysans Albatrosses’ experience of the year was quite a bit worse. The Laysans’ dismal survival rate is only eight chicks per one hundred breeding pairs.

  But day by day the survivors are losing that last fuzz of youth, looking more grown-up. We’ve watched them grow big. We’ve watched them go from wobbly to standing strongly to walking well. And we’ve seen them begin exercising their wings. With feet complete and wings waiting, the gift of flight is all that’s needed for independence.

  Almost daily, we’ve been visiting East Island. Its albatrosses have the highest survivorship among the atoll’s islands, because its elevation was high enough to avoid flooding. Over fifteen thousand chicks are getting set to go. More than ever now, you see them lined up on the beach-top berm, flapping in the breeze like a little wind-energy farm. They’re jumping straight up and down as if on trampolines, or running like colts, leaping and flapping, toes leaving the ground.

  Urged by appetite, they want to go. Many of these chicks have seen their parents for the last time. Hunger, and everything about the way their bodies and brains are changing, is moving them toward the water. For days the activity has been intensifying, and more and more big young birds have moved to the beach.

  Chicks normally remain on the beaches exercising vigorously for several days. When they’ve lost a third of their peak weight—the same formula that forces starving adults to desert nests—hunger and the wind propel them seaward. When the time comes, there are but two options: fly or die.

  So finally this morning we’re watching fledgers. Up on the breezy berm, one Black-foot spreads its exceptional new wings. It seems afraid to take that final plunge. It folds those wings, leans forward, spreads again. Closes. Leans forward. Then suddenly launches itself with conviction. Lofted by the breeze, it leaves the berm. Flapping for all it’s got, and making a go of it, it flutters into the lagoon.

  Amelia’s Travels May 28 - August 9

  In addition to its first flight, this looks like its first swim. This feels different from the firm, fast land it has always and only known. It paddles awkwardly with its wings almost fully opened, as though trying to avoid getting wet. Ungainly and unsteady at first, it soon seems accustomed to the rhythm and the feel of the yielding water that will be its universe for the next few years.

  Now begins the usual terror of adolescence: the race between learning and luck.

  First flight is one of the great joys of creation. But trepidation suppresses our urge to cheer. We’re not the only ones gathered for this much-anticipated event. Mitsuaki Iwago motions with his hand and swings his camera into the ready position. His gesture causes me to glance along the shore. There, an open-winged fledgling is paddling around, about fifty yards from the beach. Awkward movements are the norm among birds that have never before felt saltwater, but the surface around this fledger looks unusually disturbed. A sudden eruption of water shoves the bird aside. The young albatross shakes its body and wings and settles leisurely into the water. The Tiger Shark comes for a second attack, its dorsal and tail streaming through the surface. On this approach the chick, finally alarmed, pivots to actually bite the huge snout, which again misses due to the pillow of water it itself is generating. Like the thin and illusory protective cloth of a bullfighter’s cape, only a thin diaphragm of water protects the bird from the charges of the shark. In their clumsy choreography, the shark’s movements seem both unreal and absolute, abstract yet stark, oddly remote—yet imminent as death itself.

  For animals capable of such exquisite grace of motion, the excruciating slowness is the most horrific aspect of it, like dreams in which you cannot run. But with each pass the shark grows more agitated and determined; the chick, more alarmed. Just ahead of the next oncoming bulge, the chick runs sloppily along the surface and manages to get airborne. In the last few minutes, its new ability of flight has gotten it into mortal danger—and out again.

  The wind is up to a steady ten knots, invigorating the youngsters. Birds with entirely downy heads are fledging; I would have thought them too young. They fly on still-growing wing feathers that seem too short for an albatross. But they do get airborne, and fly forty or fifty yards into the lagoon. There they bob on the water, often with wings spread in the wind like little sailing ships. Other albatrosses go into the water by simply walking off the beach. They shouldn’t do this. While walking into the water does not fit the strictest scientific definit
ion of “fledging,” it certainly fits the Tiger Sharks’ looser definition.

  One chick’s entry has not gone unnoticed, and soon a long, dark shape approaches. The big, square snout followed by an awkwardly gaping mouth breaks the surface two feet from the fledgling. The bobbing bird, with wings half opened, peers at it quizzically. In the clumsy rush, the bow wave of this nine-foot Tiger Shark’s wide head also shoves its intended target sideways. The shark turns, but fails twice more, giving up the attack after a third pass. Bad luck for the shark, good luck for the bird—different ways to value the same event even in the starkest moments of life and death.

  A big, square snout followed by an awkwardly gaping mouth breaks the surface. (Norbert Wu/www.norbertwu.com)

  Five minutes later, Iwago says in a simple hush, “Attack.” A large Tiger is already closing on a nearby fledger. Its remarkable ability to approach so closely on this open flat without us seeing it is indeed an impressive display of the professional predator’s craft. The big shark comes up from directly behind the blissfully bobbing Black-foot. And this time the big square head pushes the albatross forward, not sideways. When that mouth closes, the aft half of the fledgling disappears, and in the next half instant the big dark bird is simply missing from the agitated water.

  Several other chicks are paddling nearby. Nothing troubles them. But when the next (ledger hits the water it attracts another big Tiger cruising near shore. In another clumsy bullfight, this chick does not read the message in time, and on the shark’s third pass it gets its jaws around the bird’s body, and the albatross—pecking furiously with its shiny, sharp, brand-new bill—vanishes. A slick of oil and some feathers appear at the surface.

  Several sharks have converged in the lagoon like massive foxes in a watery henhouse. It’s hard to say how many, but people have counted more than ten at a time here in past years. In the next attack, when the oncoming Tiger’s mouth drops open like a castle drawbridge, the bird actually hops atop the great snout, toppling to safety over the shark’s head.

  Out of practice since last year, many of the sharks are clumsy. But already, some are refining their approach. An enormous Tiger vaults half airborne from a sudden explosion of foam. With energy and aim we haven’t seen before, this shark hits a Laysan chick like a powered battering ram. This is the trick: don’t just come up like you’re still scavenging; aim high and come on fast. The sharks are getting the hang of this as though shaking off the fog of a memory. And while the sharks get better each fledger enters the water as naive as the last.

  Over the next couple of weeks in this lagoon, one of every ten chicks that has survived all its severe infancy will nourish a Tiger Shark. This is the deal evolution has made with albatrosses: heavier mortality early in life will be compensated by extraordinarily high survival during a lifetime four to six decades long.

  In all that lifetime—as for all these creatures—two surviving offspring are all that’s needed to keep the population stable into the next generation. So it has been for aeons. Albatrosses as a whole can well cope with hard rain and howling wind, food scarcities, and the Tigers in the sea. But evolution leaves them unequipped to deal with high, or even moderate, adult mortality—the kind that usually comes at the hand of humans.

  AT FRENCH FRIGATE SHOALS the surviving albatross chicks, rapidly mastering flight, will soon further press their luck upon the wide sea. When Amelia’s chick makes his first over-water flight he travels about a hundred yards and lands in the lagoon. Scanning the wide world from the oddly unsteady platform of the wavy liquid, it never crosses his mind to return to land. Though he has never known it before, he suddenly seems to remember that he belongs on the sea. Opening his wings, he flaps and splatters along the surface for a few seconds. And though he has never before lifted off from water, he looks rather skilled at it—not polished, but not awkward either. As he clears the surface, the only thing about his flying that looks different from an older bird’s is that he is beating his wings a little more and a little deeper, working a little harder. But so rapidly does he get the feel of this thing he was born to do that second by second you can see him growing steadier, smoother, the wing beats shallower and more effective, his motion more economical; until very soon he is at a surprising distance, sailing in long glides in a way that would be hard to distinguish from a more experienced bird. He lands in the lagoon again. And then again. And then is over the reef, outside the atoll. After so many months, his leave-taking was practically instantaneous.

  A whole world ends and another begins when a young one you have loved leaves. And who is to say that these young, so strenuously and devotedly cared for, so luminous with beauty, have not been loved in their way?

  Outside the reef, the atoll’s slopes drop sharply away. Less than a mile from the shallow turquoise lagoon, the ocean runs purple with depth. A lone Black-footed Albatross is paddling in cobalt swells. So grown-up looking is it that only the sleek, uniform darkness of its feathers—no sun-bleached wear and tear—tells you it’s this year’s freshly minted chick. Amelia’s chick lands nearby. This undulating ocean is a new world, beautiful in its austerity, like smooth skin. He scrutinizes it all intently, as you once studied with such wonder the smooth, curving surfaces of your first lover. Amelia’s chick opens his perfect wings, the breeze lifts him, and he strides northward on the propelling wind, getting smaller, smaller, then is lost from view, somewhere beyond our ken. If a multitude of luck holds, in a few years he may again swing his feet down to touch dry land.

  BY MID-JULY, Amelia’s chick is far from any shore, feeling the air pressing his wings up from below, rippling his feathers, holding his body aloft. Like most Laysan chicks, he heads northwest, wandering toward the coasts of Japan and Russia. He is exploring the sea for the first time, and everything seems new as the first day of school, greatly interesting. In his years traveling at sea, he will learn the limits of the ocean and of life.

  Gone to extremes—Amelia

  Amelia is wandering now, too. When she leaves the Aleutians, Amelia is fat and as close to happy as an albatross ever gets. She heads straight south until she crosses the transitional waters of her favorite hangout, the subarctic front, then follows the current boundary west. Amazingly, she hooks back almost exactly to the same area where, during the first week of June, she spent a week loitering within a sixty-mile radius. Here she now lingers a few days before traveling northwest and foraging heavily again. Her travels are taking her toward Russia’s Kuril Islands, north of Japan—twenty-six hundred miles from Tern Island. Here, on the western rim of the North Pacific Ocean, at the limits of the world’s greatest water, in a few weeks Amelia and her chick may cross paths.

  BRIAN ANNOUNCES THAT the plane will be here in half an hour. In a few minutes, everyone on the island will help clear the runway, walking and biking along, shooing birds.

  In the past four years the plane has killed only one albatross. But this year it’s hit four, killing two. Even this is a consequence of the hot, calm weather with reduced wind—making albatrosses much slower at getting airborne.

  Brian brings out the tractor—the only motorized land vehicle for hundreds of miles—in case a crash necessitates moving bodies in a hurry. Fire extinguishers are readied. All in accord with official protocol.

  We hear the distant plane—very faintly.

  One Laysan Albatross walks straight from the vegetation toward Melissa, as though it knows she’s a veterinarian and it has a health question. She raises her arms and encourages it to go back into the brush. So intent on coming out is it, Melissa has to chase the bird twice.

  A few birds—mostly noddies, some boobies, an albatross or two—are constantly in the air nearby. Up high swirl a few hundred Sooty Terns. Another much larger flock of terns and frigatebirds is wheeling out over the breakers on the reef edge, out of harm’s path.

  Melissa has to chase that one Laysan back yet again, talking to it, lifting her arms, trying to shoo it back. It seems to have bonded with her; perhaps it think
s they’re dancing.

  Exactly on time, the plane appears in the sky. A Black-footed Albatross is flying low over the runway and another one is just walking out. Anthony runs to scare the walker back, but it goes straight in the direction the plane is coming from.

  Frightened birds—mostly noddies—rise and crowd the air chaotically as the plane approaches. No albatrosses are in its path, but some noddies and boobies are still streaming across the airstrip. The plane hits the ground and runs the entire length of the strip—and in some fierce combination of skill and luck, it does not strike a single bird of any kind.

  Now the albatrosses’ clapping bills seem like applause. The tension relaxes, and everybody walks slowly toward the plane. Almost immediately, Melissa’s one persistent albatross walks onto the runway yet again.

  The plane as usual brings letters, supplies, goodies, film, food.

  Brendan and I are leaving. Everyone exchanges addresses, telephone numbers, and e-mail information, hoping these precious and intense new friendships can be made to outlast the unforeseeable miles and years.

  Reluctantly I lift my feet from the island and into the plane. Waving, waving, waving, we take off.

  We swing out over the reef edge, gaining altitude and a splendid view of the atoll: the sandy islands, that emerald lagoon, the stark pinnacle, the dark ocean. Outside the gleaming, creamy breakers, a whale blows three times as it swims along. Brendan points and leans back so I can see it. I nod.

  We climb to seventy-five hundred feet and level off, wrapped in a blue flannel sky. The flying is smooth.

  As we speed east along the chain, each occasional island looks perfectly inlaid into the blue enamel of the sea below, like a piece in a sacred mosaic. Yet each seems to float. It’s hard to fully comprehend that these are just the tips of an enormous mountain range, grown from a seafloor thousands of feet below. Anne Morrow Lindbergh responded to the idea that no one is an island by saying, “I feel we are all islands—in a common sea.” That is an appealing refinement of the idea, but there is something else deeper. Perhaps we only seem like islands because all our shared underpinnings, which have brought us up and hold us into the sunlight, lie unseen below the surface. Now and then we think we might detect submerged connections by a whiff of something familiar, by an upwelling of memory or empathy or the urge to show kindness to another creature, like a visible pattern of ripples at the surface caused by something lying far below. The rock-hard ties to all these other islands—human and nonhuman, current and past—lie out of sight, deep in time, massively holding together all our fragile little islands, yet barely recognized and seldom acknowledged. What a different view of life we would have if we mapped our islands not by their perimeter as seen from the surface but by their profile and foundation, showing always the roots and connections within the shared mountain chain. Could we not recognize ourselves as part of the same chain of Life, originated from the same hot spot? Are we not little kindred isles adrift a sea of time, on a conveyor of space? We are born. We have our adventures. And we are sucked back in, to be reintegrated, recast in the continuing saga of our singular island home afloat the oceanic universe.