Eye of the Albatross: Visions of Hope and Survival

by Carl Safina

  All the animals here are tame, because—present company excluded—the place lacks land mammals. So the animals’ minds lack the pawprint of fear. “Tame” means unafraid, but not friendly. They either ignore or scold you as you pass. Extend a hand to see whether a noddy is incubating an egg, and rather than flee it vigorously bites. No serious harm from its tweezery bill, but you get the point: this is their place, and they’re not scared of you.

  Their fearlessness makes this seem like paradise without predators. But watch closely. A tern chick is vulnerable to a frigatebird. Rummaging Ruddy Turnstones and Bristle-thighed Curlews will happily peck open an egg if granted a chance. And each of the seemingly pacifist seabirds turns predator at sea. Paradise depends on which side of an appetite you find yourself.

  Great whirling clouds of Sooty Terns are gathering overhead, and they will stay aloft all day, not landing until about sunset. They are patterned striking black above and white below, with elegant forked tails and a white forehead. Their squeeze-toy call sounds like they’re saying, Wide awake, wide awake. About ten thousand of them have returned so far. These constitute only the vanguard—perhaps a tenth—of the eventual breeders, merely the first breath of a living hurricane that will nest several months hence. The rest remain at sea. You would think the birds flying overhead would be more anxious to land, because all the while they are at sea they apparently fly nonstop and never rest. They land only to breed. Juveniles appear to fly continuously for up to five years before they touch down for their first nesting attempt. No wonder landing seems like a big deal for them. Dave admits awe: “These birds still have me knocked back on may heels.”

  HERE IN THE EXTREME OCEAN, many of the birds are built for ultimate flight efficiency. Land is almost an afterthought in their design. Tropicbirds are so aerial they’re crippled on the ground. To reduce wing loading for travel far offshore, they have traded away leg muscle. They cannot stand. Shoving along the ground with both feet, they push themselves forward piteously, thudding their breast with each “step.” Strange and severe. Their close neighbors and distant relatives the frigatebirds have enormous wings for their size—quite possibly the greatest sail-area-to-body-weight ratio of any birds. For a bird with a six-foot wingspan. Great Frigatebirds are extraordinarily light: three pounds, a mere kilogram and a half. Their feathers reputedly weigh more than their skeletons. Frigatebirds’ feet are nearly as useless as tropicbirds’. Frigatebirds can’t land on water. Can’t swim. Can’t walk. Their sharp-clawed toes are strictly designed as clamps for holding branches when they land. Frigatebirds are built to fly and geared to snatch food, and that’s it.

  But what frigates do, they do devastatingly well. At sea frigatebirds make a living chasing and robbing other birds, threatening them with their hooked bills until they drop or disgorge the fish they’ve caught. Most birds are smart to distrust them—and to not leave chicks unguarded.

  Look up at these dark frigatebirds, their forked tails streaming, their long crooked wings recurved. Flying crossbows, they evince a grace most sinister. A dozen of them are cruising back and forth in the uplifting cushion of breeze on the windward side of the island. A booby commits the mistake of returning to the island right here. One frigate immediately makes chase, and a pack quickly follows. The booby attempts evasions, but the frigate twists expertly, locked in like a heat-seeking missile. Now other frigates close in, and the booby cuts its losses, coughing up its tithing. The falling fish is immediately snatched by Frigate One.

  I catch a blur out of the corner of my eye and put my head down just in time for a Masked Booby to slam into me so hard that it slaps the reinforced brim of my cap against my face, then falls dazed to the ground—its penalty for not watching where it was going. It must have had its eye on the frigates. Had I not been wearing a hard-brimmed cap, I might have gotten skewered in the face by its carrot-sized bill. The bird picks itself up from the ground and flies off again.

  Frigatebirds not airborne crowd the highest bushes. It’s their mating season, and the dark-bodied males have their erotic, heart-shaped, scarlet throat sacks inflated, hoping to attract a female. With those swollen throats tautly distended, they sit shockingly unashamed, overtly sexual, falsely nonchalant, quiet and smug in the knowledge of their own sexiness—yet always a little insecure about whether they’re attractive enough, and whether they have what it will take to make it in the fierce competition for a mate. One female on a mere flyby immediately sets all the males a-quiver. Now she lands among one group of blooming males like a thorn among roses—and the inflated admirers are going mad with lust, shaking their outstretched wings, rocking their heads side to side jiggling those big swollen balloons, and uttering spooky, wavering howls. Despite the scarlet intensity of the males’ desire, the female looks utterly disinterested. But she’s landed for a reason, and she’s making her calculations: Who seems strongest? Who looks oldest and has survived longest? Who has won the best spot on this bush? Is anyone here good enough for me? She sizes up the suitors. Then—she simply departs, leaving a wake of shaking, rattling, howling males.

  Along the beach berm, sleeping like yellow logs under the bushes, lie several Hawaiian Monk Seals, rare and endangered animals that inhabit only these islands. And on the wet lower sand, lapped and lulled by wavelets from the lagoon, naps a male Green Turtle of impressive heft—perhaps three hundred pounds. This chain of islands is one of the very few places remaining on Earth where non-nesting sea turtles still regularly bask on beaches during daylight.

  One Sooty Tern is lying on the dry sand. Life has left it. I pick it up by its picklike bill and run my fingers along its soft, feathered contours. It is an immaculate death. Bright. Sleek. So lovely that its corpse invites contact, offers assurance that close admiration will not disturb. It seems in excellent health, save that it’s dead. We envision collision with another tern during darkness, with fatal consequence. Patty asks to see it and takes it gently from my hands. Stroking the dead tern, Patty says, “I know there are many important reasons for conservation, but I think mainly we care about nature because of its beauty.”

  ALBATROSSES AREN’T the most numerous birds here, but on wings spanning seven feet, they get your attention. Two species of albatross breed here: the Laysan Albatross and the Black-footed. Every few minutes a bird who’s been at sea crosses the pale tropical flats. Some arrive over your head on their immense bowed wings. Others come low, almost touching the sand. The tips of their long wings curve down conspicuously, like the head of a pickax. At this close range, they seem on the far side of enormous.

  One Laysan Albatross is coursing airily up and down the island’s shore, zooming half a mile with each directional change. It does this for many minutes on end. We can speculate on the costs of this seeming waste of energy, but this bird challenges us to explain the benefits. I sense the exertion of a joy so sheer and light it embodies the most time-tested truths.

  Some albatrosses land awkwardly, coming a little too fast, having trouble arresting their momentum, hitting the vegetation and rolling forward on their chests. But usually they land skillfully; impressive if you consider they haven’t touched firm ground for weeks.

  No welcoming committee awaits. No fanfare. Just a mate at the nest, who has sat incubating throughout the time the arriving bird wandered at sea. At this reunion and relief, no rejoicing ensues. The mate actually seems reluctant to yield custody. That’s surprising. After three weeks of incubation, you’d think hunger and prolonged endurance—and sheer boredom—would grow unbearable and they’d veritably spring from the nest at first sight of their mate. But no. Old habits die hard, and arriving birds sometimes have to shove their spouses off the nest.

  Patty, Dave, Anthony, and I are watching one such homecoming albatross trying to relieve its mate. Anthony interprets: “A lot of times, it takes them half an hour to switch. It can take hours, one trying to walk onto the egg and the other trying to stay put—like they’re in a trance to incubate.”

  When an albatross
finally departs, it needs a lot of running room. Some run the width of the runway—about forty yards—before getting airborne. They run along with their outstretched wings waving, waving, waving—always into the wind if there is any breeze at all—and patter along with their feet loudly slapping the ground. Eventually the job of defying gravity shifts from their feet to their wings, and they are off and magnificent.

  IN THE SIEGE of space-time that is jet travel, it’s easy to forget just how much water separates Hawaii from the continents. The Hawaiian chain comprises the most isolated islands on Earth. No other islands are so far from any mainland. And consider this: the Hawaiian chain is so disconnected from the rest of the ocean that one-third of its reef fish species are found nowhere else on Earth. Of the hundreds of Pacific coral species, fewer than 10 percent have ever reached the Hawaiian Islands. No land mammal (and only one bat) ever reached the islands. So few birds reached Hawaii that most of its native land birds actually evolved on the islands, adapted descendants of those stray fragments of flying DNA that were the few birds blown so far off course.

  Even by Hawaiian standards, the remotest part of the Hawaiian archipelago is this string of islands and atolls called the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. They stretch more than a thousand miles west from what you usually think of as Hawaii. They include a series of isolated dots and dabs in the wide sea, rocks and atolls and other shards of barely emergent land you may never have heard of: Nihoa Island, Necker, French Frigate Shoals, Gardner Pinnacles, Maro Reef, Laysan Island, Lisianski Island, Pearl and Hermes Reef, Midway Atoll (the only famous member, flashpoint of the pivotal World War II sea battle), and Kure Atoll. These ten little exiled lands range in size from Maro Reef’s single emergent rock and Gardner Pinnacles’ three dry acres to Midway’s 2.3 square miles. Anchored in a deep sea yet adrift in deep time on Earth’s floating crust, these islands have become terra firma’s tiny outposts to the northwest, far from surfboards, bikinis, packaged tours, June honeymoons, and the rest.

  Though little and remote, they’re crammed with seabirds—six million breeding seabirds, of eighteen species. If you count juveniles and non-breeders, the number balloons to fourteen million. Having just 0.1 percent of Hawaii’s land area, they provide breeding ground for 95 percent of its seabirds. This includes some 600,000 breeding pairs of Laysan Albatross, and 60,000 Black-footed Albatross pairs—virtually their entire world populations. The sheer concentration of birds makes the density of life here hugely impressive.

  Tern Island, where we are, is among this holy group of isles. Its parent atoll, French Frigate Shoals, is a roughly circular rock and coral platform nearly twenty miles wide, dotted with scarcely dry land. Though it is the largest of the chain’s atolls, most of French Frigate is the underwater lagoon. Tern Island, though less than a mile long, is the largest island here. Most of the others are too small for a long stroll, and often get washed over.

  But these tiny sites are the reproductive generators of wildife inhabiting many millions of square miles of ocean—including U.S. waters, other nations’ territories, and the high seas. In other words, without these safe havens, wildlife populations throughout the North Pacific would shrivel. So although the area of these dollops of land is a trivially tiny fraction of the ocean’s total realm, the ecological “footprint” of the islands is enormous, vast as the sea itself.

  IN THE LATE 1800s, fortune-seeking plume hunters began hammering away at the birds and their islands. Feathers became high fashion in America and Europe, so wildly popular that the hunting soon threatened to exterminate numerous bird species. Only a small number of people cared that certain birds were headed for extinction, but one of them happened to be president of the United States. Teddy Roosevelt had a soft spot for seabirds, and he put his boot down. Wielding his big stick—the privilege of executive order—in 1909 he created the Hawaiian Islands Bird Reservation, now the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands National Wildlife Refuge. National wildlife refuges had been his idea, and this was the second such refuge ever established. French Frigate Shoals and most of the other Northwestern Hawaiian Islands are included (only Kure Atoll, at the chain’s end, is not a designated refuge). It is fitting tribute to the greatness of Theodore Roosevelt’s vision and compassion that a century later we remain grateful for his wildlife refuges, national forests, and national parks.

  Roosevelt’s vision seems even more remarkable when you consider that seabirds breeding on other islands of the tropical Pacific have suffered widespread losses. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Dr. Beth Flint recently reviewed seabird status in twenty-six countries throughout the tropical Pacific. Of these countries, she wrote, “perhaps only eight still have healthy colonies of the most vulnerable species, and only six of these have legal protection for sites, and management plans. Just a subset of these countries are actually implementing management for their seabird colonies.” More than 90 percent of the birds that have gone extinct over the last few centuries have been island nesters, including both sea- and land birds. Birds have a hard time when humans and their domestic animals arrive on isolated islands.

  Hawaiian Archipelago

  WE STOP TO LOOK at one albatross alone on its nest just a few paces from the porch steps. Patty is planning to include this bird among the first in her satellite tracking study. I decide to give this scientific pioneer of the air a name: Amelia.

  The bird I’m trying to admire is, I have to say, not the most engaging bird I’ve ever met. Amelia’s been sitting on her single egg nearly two weeks during this shift, oblivious to the world. Like Dr. Seuss’s Horton the elephant, an incubating albatross is faithful to its egg—100 percent. On their nests—and there are nests on the ground all around us—they seem detached from reality. They make no eye contact. Day upon week they sit dazed with broodiness, mostly dozing with bill tucked under wing and eyes closed, now and then opening a lid to see whether the world has gone away. They’re not interested in you. Even if they’re watching with one eye, they usually don’t bother taking their bill from under their feathers as you walk by.

  They’re not interested, but I am. I’m lagging behind the others so I can look enough to begin actually seeing. The albatrosses seem to maintain a certain grace despite themselves; a beauty unselfconscious as a child’s.

  Black-footed Albatrosses appear chocolate-dipped. They’re the color of double-fudge brownies; they’re that dark. They support their brownish-black bodies upon black legs and eponymous black feet. Their faces feature ashy gray detailing at the bill’s base, and subtly contrasting light highlighting just below their dark eyes. They walk with their necks low and outstretched, their heads going from side to side, giving them an exaggerated, hunched, Groucho Marx air, a comically sinister gangster look.

  The Laysan Albatrosses, conversely, tend to take a high-stepping, high-headed waddle with their pink legs and feet. The Laysans bear a blackish cape upon a white body. The head is finely airbrushed. The basic black eyes are rimmed with white-lined lids, set into a lovely dark pastel eye-shadow mask that is black just ahead of the eye and blends to a fine powder-gray dust on the cheeks. Their bill is light pumpkin-orange or pinkish, grading to a light gray tip.

  An albatross bill is a heavily constructed weapon made of a dozen or so separate plates connected as though welded, ending with a nail-like hook. It means business, and most everyone who works with albatrosses has scars to attest. Hard, tubed-shaped nostrils lie along each side of the bill, indicating the albatrosses’ membership in a large family called the tube-nosed seabirds.

  The softness in albatrosses is not in their feathers, which are stiff, but in the powdered gradations of color. Shade and tone. And in the bits of skin exposed to air. Albatrosses’ scaly feet and legs—the most reptilian parts—are most surprising. The scales are embedded in supple skin, and the webbing between the long toes is as soft as fine buckskin or chamois. The albatrosses’ feathers form a dense and surprisingly stiff armoring against the cold sea, the blasting wind, and the beating sun.
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  These birds live all their lives out in open weather. They know no sense of cover. Not only do they take no shelter, but they’re exposed to some of the harshest extremes of heat, cold, water, and wind the world can hurl. These are sturdy beings.

  THE NAME albatross stems from the Arabic word for pelican, al-qadous, derived from the Greek word kados, for the leather scoop on ancient water wheels (thus referring to the pelican’s capacious bill-pouch as a water bucket). Spanish and Portuguese sailors corrupted this name for pelican to algatraz or alcatraz. Mediterranean mariners exploring farther into the Atlantic and Caribbean began using familiar names for unfamiliar birds, widening alcatraz to include pelicans’ relatives, like gannets, boobies, and frigatebirds. In the 1500s, south-venturing mariners began describing enormous seabirds never before seen by Europeans.

  In 1593 Sir Richard Hawkins, newly confronted by the great albatrosses, observed, “During this storme, certain great fowles … soared about us … and from the poynt of one wing to the poynt of the other, both stretched out, was about two fathomes” (twelve feet). By the 1600s English mariners had adopted the Spanish name. Sailing toward Madagascar in 1638, Peter Mundy noted, “Allcatrazes is againe the biggest of any Seaffowle I have yett seene … hee seemeth not to Move att all as hee Flyeth leisurely and close to the Rymme of the water.” English accents began softening the hard Arabic c to g or b. And so in 1673 John Fryer referred to “Albetrosses” while rounding the Cape of Good Hope on a passage to India, and the highly traveled William Dampier remarked on the extreme size of “Algatrosses” in 1697. On a circumnavigating voyage between 1719 and 1722, George Shelvocke was impressed by “the largest sort of sea-fowls … extending their wings 12 or 13 foot,” and he called them “Albitroses.”