The Shark and the Albatross

by John Aitchison

  Before setting out I visit my grandmother, who has not been well. As we sit with our cups of tea I play down the eighteen-hour flight to the Falkland Islands and the 1,400km (870-mile) crossing in a yacht: five days on the world’s stormiest seas. She does not share my urge to travel and has been abroad just twice. Even the thought of flying terrifies her – the legacy perhaps of being bombed during the Blitz and of seeing a Zeppelin looming over her home when she was very young. The enormous airship is one of her earliest memories. It had flown from Germany to attack London. In 1918 that was an almost unimaginably long flight across the sea, but flights over many thousands of miles of ocean had been happening long before my grandma was born. They were among the world’s greatest journeys and they were made by the birds I am going to film: wandering albatrosses.

  She asks me why it is worth travelling so far to film them and I tell her about the albatrosses’ graceful courtship dances and the long partnerships they forge to raise their chicks. I describe the young birds’ exceptional wingspan, the world’s largest at over three metres. My job will be to film them learning to fly. Our cups of tea chill as we imagine these giants leaving their island for the first time and skimming away across the waves.

  Sometimes, as we talk, her eyes lose focus. We sit quietly then and I hold her hand, tracing the veins under her translucent skin as I wait, thinking how close we’ve always been, my grandma and I. Then she stirs and repeats her question and we start again.

  She has always taken pleasure in noticing small details, pointing out the beautiful shape of a leaf, remembering the subtle colours of flowers. She notices people’s feelings too and experience has made her wise.

  ‘Will you miss your family, while the children are young and changing so fast?’ she asks, remembering how my grandad had felt, after a year and a half of war, coming home to find his young daughter didn’t recognise him. My grandma’s memories of that homecoming and the long-vanished Zeppelin are as fresh as ever, but several times she asks me where she lives. Her recent past has almost completely gone.

  ‘It’s no fun getting old, dear,’ she says, as I leave to start my journey.

  When I reach Bird Island a week later, I am still thinking about the respect we owe to those with age and experience, and about family and memory and loss, because these things also matter in nature: they help to define the albatross.

  Driving snow buffets the windows of the base, flexing the glass as I look out at Jordan Cove. The beach is slick and grey. It is like November at home but this is the summer in the South Atlantic. Beyond the mouth of the bay, where waves explode on rock, there is an angular white hole on the horizon. It’s an iceberg.

  Bird Island lies just west of South Georgia and although it is a Holy Grail for wildlife filmmakers they certainly don’t come here for the weather. Even in summer, when it’s light for seventeen hours a day, the temperature hovers around 2°C (36°F) and the island is almost always wrapped in cloud. A million seabirds build their nests here and, with a bird or mammal in every one and a half square metres, the island is one of the richest places for wildlife anywhere in the world. A handful of scientists from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) make up the entire human population and they have been kind enough to invite two visitors to stay: Matt and me.

  I am up at dawn because it is my turn to be on start-up. I already have my list of duties on a clipboard so I set off towards the generator shed. There are many thousands of fur seals on the beach. Some are sleeping but plenty of others are awake and wailing like the damned. The gantry leading to the shed and pier is also carpeted with seals. The loo at the end of the pier used to be the only one on Bird Island. There are toilets inside now too but the scientists sometimes visit the old one anyway. They seem to enjoy the challenge of urgently running the gauntlet.

  Some of the seals snort and lunge at my legs as I dodge between them. It’s a relief to open the shed door and duck inside. It seems bizarre to go from a world-class wildlife spectacle to this industrial building, with its two generators the size of tractors and its red fire pumps, but this is what the British Antarctic Survey needs to operate its scientific base. I start to work my way through the checklist: first I have to dip a finger in the radiators to check they are full, then look for leaks, take down readings from dials on the fire pumps … and all the time above my head I can hear footsteps: seabirds called sheathbills are up there, pecking at the metal roof. It sounds like messages from inmates being tapped out on the pipes in a prison. I am in a hurry to start filming this morning but the list continues over the page: … dip the oil, open the air vents, select ‘auto’ on the generator and turn the key. It starts noisily. Next I turn on the power in the base. Beeps follow, lots of them, and I wonder whether this is normal.

  Leaving the shed, I check behind the door in case it’s hiding a seal, and as usual it is, and as usual he tries to bite me. If I can get past him I can go back inside and make some coffee. On Bird Island whoever is doing start-up gets up before the others, but when I enter the base all the scientists are awake and clustered in the corridor in their underpants, trying to turn off a very loud alarm I have set off inadvertently.

  We all take turns doing each of the jobs because the base is self-sufficient and there are only seven of us here, so the others have little choice but to trust an incompetent like me with such important things as the generators. The scientists are very good at start-up but they have had more practice. Some of them will spend two and a half years on the island and they receive special training, in dentistry for instance, so they can drill each other’s teeth in the depths of winter, when the population of the base is down to four or five. In the past only three people over-wintered and they knew a thing or two about missing home. For company they used to play darts matches with other Antarctic bases, by radio. It was years before the others realised that Bird Island had never had a dartboard.

  It is a relief to know that we are going to start by filming the wandering albatrosses, rather than the seals. Their colony on Bird Island is one of the largest anywhere but the nesting birds will not be easy to reach, even though the island is just a few miles long. Albatrosses need strong winds to take off, so they build their nests high up: Matt and I have a climb ahead of us and first we must pass the thousands of fur seals who sincerely believe the beach is theirs. We shoulder our packs and pick up the tripod then Matt opens the door, blinking in the cold air, and immediately slams it shut. A male fur seal is sprawled exactly where he was about to step. Belatedly he opens a shutter in the door, as if he were checking for flames outside a plane, and we are relieved to see the seal flumping away down the steps, leaving a perfect image of himself on the walkway: a pointed snout, thick neck then a tapering body and two pairs of long, elegant flippers, outlined by the snow that fell as he slept. Fur seals are related more closely to sea lions than to the seals we have in Britain: the males are pugnacious, they weigh more than I do and they can move very quickly.

  Yesterday I found a tray full of their yellow canine teeth in the lab. They were long, curved and very sharp. I would have guessed they came from a leopard if I hadn’t read the label. By grinding their upper and lower canines together, the seals sharpen their edges. As I tested them gingerly against my finger Matt told me that seals bite three-quarters of the island’s visitors. There was a broom beside the lab door. On the head someone had written Sweeping, but on the handle it said Fighting: someone else has been thinking about the fur seals’ teeth.

  Bird Island is remote, even by wildlife filming standards: if there is an emergency we are far beyond the range of helicopters from the Falklands and in the whole of South Georgia there is nowhere to land a plane. As we leave the base Matt and I each pull a broom handle from a box on the walkway. These two pieces of wood do not seem much to have between us and the seals.

  ‘What do we do if we get bitten, Matt?’

  ‘Clean out the wound as much as you can with a scrubbing brush and disinfect it,’ he says, ‘and hope it’s not
anywhere important. If it is you might have to stay in bed for a month or more. If it’s really bad we’d have to radio for a ship to come and get you, but that could take weeks. To get picked up from Bird Island you’d pretty much have to have an ingrowing tooth, or be pregnant.’

  Then he adds cheerfully, ‘I’ve asked for loads of wound wash.’

  Our boots splash among the rocks and the seals on either side raise their heads. Some bare their teeth and snort, which in the cold air shoots clouds of vapour and seal snot two metres in our direction. Others give rumbling growls deep enough to do credit to a lion, making their long whiskers vibrate, but they spoil the effect immediately by adding a high-pitched whine: ‘Oof choof, oof choof.’ This is so much the sound of life around the base that the scientists even say it to each other when they hear something racy, with extra emphasis – Oof CHOOF!

  The male seals arch their backs and point their muzzles at the sky, as if they are doing something difficult in yoga, but the most striking thing about them is their smell. It’s pure testosterone and they reek like a room full of unwashed rugby kit. They are waiting for the females to return from the sea, to pup and then to mate, and if anything else comes into their territory it is something to bite. I imagine them grinding their teeth to give them an edge. We need to cross the beach none the less, so we point our broom handles outwards and, with Matt watching our left side and me watching our right, we move briskly between the snarling seals.

  Some make mock charges at us but perhaps our determination is more impressive than we realise because they let us through unbitten and their ‘oof choofs’ fade as we reach a stream spreading over the stones. Female seals will not pup in running water so the streams are a no-man’s-land and the best way to move around unmolested. We climb away from the shore, walking in the water and banging our broom handles on the rocks of the streambed. It winds between mounds of tussock grass, a plant like the marram on coastal dunes at home, which here grows far up the slopes of the hills in clumps almost as tall as a man. The wind blowing through its coarse stems makes a constant whispering: it’s the universal sound of Bird Island away from the seal beaches. Matt leads me through a maze of smaller streams where tussocks loom over us, blocking the view.

  ‘I’m starting to wonder if I’ll find my way back, Matt.’

  ‘There’s always an antsy seal on this corner,’ he points out, by way of a landmark.

  ‘What happens if he moves?’

  In the streambed yellow objects shift and clack under our boots, sounding more like plastic than pebbles. I look more closely and realise they are bones: hundreds of curved ribs and flat shoulder blades, with tough ridges for anchoring muscles. My foot rests on a jawbone and one of those sharply curved teeth. I shall know this place again at least: it’s where the males who have lost their fights on the beach come to die.

  We climb higher and the fog eddies about us, sometimes opening to show parts of the bay spread out below, with the small base surrounded by some of the island’s 65,000 fur seals. As Matt and I turn away from the sea, the mist parts and there they are: enormous white birds scattered across a meadow and the valley beyond: a hundred wandering albatrosses.

  People have known for centuries that the great albatrosses existed. The first Europeans to sail beyond 30°S could hardly have missed them, given the birds’ habit of following ships. As early as 1593 Sir Richard Hawkins wrote that ‘certain great fowles as big as swannes soared about us … from the point of one wing to the point of the other, both stretched out, was about two fathoms’. The sailors caught and ate them as a welcome break from salted meat, but some also believed the birds were the souls of their lost shipmates and it was this supernatural aspect that Samuel Taylor Coleridge made famous in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The unfortunate mariner killed an albatross and for ever bore the consequences, becoming first becalmed, then driven half mad by thirst, when ‘slimy things did crawl with legs upon the slimy sea’. The rest of his crew cursed him and hung the dead albatross around his neck before they died. Some say the Rime was inspired by Captain James Cook’s second voyage of discovery because, as a boy, Coleridge had been taught by William Wales, Cook’s astronomer. Wales would have seen albatrosses at sea but he would also have encountered them in South Georgia, which was one of the many islands discovered on that expedition. Cook named it after King George III and he also gave Bird Island its name, perhaps for its most obvious birds: the great albatrosses. Coleridge’s Mariner was spared the fate of his crew because he came to appreciate the beauty and the worth of ‘all things, both great and small’ and he spent the rest of his days making amends by spreading that message, even when his listeners were desperate to get away. Much has been discovered about albatrosses since Coleridge’s time and, thanks to research done on Bird Island, we now know that his fateful albatross could have been more ancient than the Mariner himself.

  The first bird flies so low over our heads that the long whoosh of air across its wings sounds like a passing glider. It is impossible not to gasp at its size. The albatross’s wings are narrow and pointed and each one is almost as long as I am tall. Its feet are tucked invisibly into its belly feathers and all its body contours are aerodynamic shapes, smooth and rounded. It turns over the valley and comes back without a flap, holding its great wings almost perfectly flat. This is more like being at an air display than watching a bird. Wanderers are so efficient that they can glide twenty times further than the height they lose doing so, and in flight they use little more energy than they do on the ground, but even the best gliders need lift and for them that comes from the wind. Although some types of albatross live in the tropics, like the blackfooted ones I filmed being attacked by tiger sharks, all the really large species fly around the Southern Ocean, which is the most consistently windy place on the planet. Having such a remote and inaccessible home is why it took people so long to find out much about their lives.

  On 24 November 1958, exactly fifty years before Matt and I gaze up at our first low-flying wanderer and it gazes back at us, an appropriately named ship, the MV Albatross, steamed into Jordan Cove and landed four men, who promptly put up two tents and a small shed. The scientists of that first Bird Island base included Lance Tickell, who had come here to learn everything he could about wandering albatrosses. There was a great deal to discover. Even their scientific name, Diomedea exulans, suggests they have secrets. Exulans means homeless, and although Tickell knew that Bird Island was one of the few places the wanderers did call home, he had no idea where they went while at sea: in fact no one did. Clearly, the birds did more than just wander about locally, searching for squid, but at the time the best guess was that they travelled only a few hundred miles.

  Shortly after Matt and I arrived in the modern buildings that have replaced the original shed, the current albatross scientist, Derren Fox, showed us a film Lance Tickell made about his work.

  ‘I’m just going up to see the men,’ Tickell said, before setting off on his daily round of the nests and young birds. In forthright fifties fashion he deftly grabbed each albatross chick by the beak and bundled it under his arm, before weighing it and attaching a numbered ring to its leg. Some of the methods he employed, such as spray-painting a few adults red, now seem rather harsh, but this was pioneering stuff and in the days before GPS and satellite tags there was a point to it. Tickell’s idea was to ask the Royal Navy and merchant seamen to look out for his painted birds and to report their positions. His plan paid off spectacularly when the first red albatross turned up half the world away, off the coast of Tasmania. It was the first inkling of what later studies on Bird Island and elsewhere have shown in great detail: that albatrosses are among the most widely travelled animals of all. They circle the globe repeatedly and in a lifetime might fly a million miles.

  The work started by Lance Tickell continues today, although Derren now uses electronic tags instead of paint to track the birds. Some tags are as small as electrical fuses, recording just the time and day length, the min
imum he needs to work out a rough position. Others can sense when an albatross has settled on the sea to feed. Some house GPS transmitters and send hourly reports to a satellite. The results are emailed to Derren while the bird is still in flight. The maps they produce would have delighted Lance Tickell. Each line plots the path of a single albatross, tracked from its nest on Bird Island. It is clear that for them the ocean is far from featureless. One bird’s path could have been drawn with a ruler. For hours her positions were about 65km (40 miles) apart, as evenly spaced as beads on a wire, then they became bunched. Derren explains that she had settled on the water. We check the time on the map – it was night – and we wonder whether she slept there, drifting slowly eastwards on the restless sea. In the morning her track resumed on the same bearing, north-west, towards South America. No one knows how albatrosses find their way but perhaps they combine senses we can barely imagine with their memories and long experience.

  The scientists’ methods have changed since Lance Tickell’s time but Derren still goes out every day ‘to see the men’ and above all to check which chicks are ready to fly. Matt and I need to know that too.

  In the viewfinder an adult is flying straight towards me, lining up for his final approach, lowering his feet and at the same time raising his neck. Feathers lift and flutter along the top of his wings, pulled away by the lower air pressure. He holds himself there, flying as slowly as he can, a whisker away from crashing. How pilots must wish they could feel the edge of a stall the way this bird does, but few would envy how he lands. Despite a strong headwind he is still doing twenty knots when he hits the ground hard, throwing his wings up and forward to protect them from the impact. Apparently this is quite usual because he soon stands up and shakes himself, unharmed. He furls his immense wings, transforming himself from a flier to a walker. On the ground he seems even more enormous than in the air. His plumage is almost completely white, telling us that he is a male. His robust beak does the same. It is pink and about six inches long, hooked at the end for dismembering squid. A few feathers on his neck have fine grey marks, like lines drawn with a hard pencil, and in common with most large birds, the tips of his wings are black, strengthened against wear and tear by the pigment melanin. His webbed, lilac-coloured feet are larger than my hands. I imagine him standing beside a mute swan, the largest bird at home. His body is wider than a swan’s and he stands taller, despite his shorter neck. His head is bigger and more rounded too, with black unfathomable eyes under jutting brows.