Eye of the Albatross: Visions of Hope and Survival

by Carl Safina

  Shelvocke’s journal described a storm near Cape Horn, during which a “disconsolate” black albatross “accompanied us for several days, hovering about us as if he had lost himself.” One of Shelvocke’s officers, “observing, in one of his melancholy fits, that this bird was always hovering near us, imagined, from his colour, that it might be some ill omen … . The more to encourage his superstition, was the continued series of contrary tempestuous winds, which had oppress’d us ever since we had got into this sea.” The man shot the albatross, “not doubting (perhaps) that we should have a fair wind after it.” What actually followed were winds so severe it took them six weeks to sight the coast of Chile. By the late 1760s, Captain Cook’s naturalist Joseph Banks began using the modern form albatross, and this word, with its Greek and Arabic roots, is now understood worldwide.

  In 1797 William Wordsworth had been reading Shelvocke’s account when he took a long, moonlit night walk with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. During their passage on moorland paths from Alfoxden to the fishing village of Watchet, Wordsworth described the incident to Coleridge, thus providing the seed of inspiration that in 1798 blossomed into “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” That epic poem gave us, of course, the image of the albatross around one’s neck. Any belief among seamen that killing albatrosses would bring bad luck dates from Coleridge’s poem. (A more genuine notion actually borne by some mariners—if perhaps tongue in cheek—was that when old sailors died they returned as albatrosses.)

  Coleridge’s poem turned the albatross into a metaphor from which the bird has never escaped. But the metaphor has been distorted and is often misapplied. “An albatross” has become an icon of unshakably burdensome responsibility, psychological distress, or social baggage. We hear people say things like “That project has been an albatross around her neck.” Somehow the albatross has been made the villain, the bad thing. But an albatross is not the same as a white elephant (some physical thing too big to manage and that no one else wants, like a huge, inherited run-down house that won’t sell) or a ball and chain (an acquired burden that is a constant emotional drag). Only if the dilemma you have is your own fault, if your suffering is deserved, is it, metaphorically speaking, your “albatross.” In the original poem, the crewman is made to wear around his neck the albatross he killed. The burden of his own deed is his just punishment and reminder for his offense.

  And I had done a hellish thing,

  And it would work ’em woe:

  For all averred, I had killed the bird

  That made the breeze to blow.

  In the windless calm that follows, the sailing ship lies helplessly stranded under “a hot and copper sky,” beneath “the bloody Sun.” Eventually afflicted by horrible thirst—“Water, water, every where, / Nor any drop to drink … . /And every tongue, through utter drought, / Was withered at the root … . / With throats unslaked, with black lips baked, / We could nor laugh nor wail”—everyone on the ship, except the Mariner, dies. Thus by its authorship of the wind the bird plays a critical role in atmospheric nature and human survival, which is unrecognized and unappreciated until the bird is killed, whereupon all share the unforeseen consequence of its destruction.

  When the Mariner finally recognizes the beauty of all nature—in a sight no one else would likely declare beautiful—the encumbrance around his neck disappears. The revelation comes to him while watching sea snakes swimming alongside the ship by moonlight, leaving tracks in the phosphorescence of the ocean:

  Beyond the shadow of the ship,

  I watched the water-snakes:

  They moved in tracks of shining white,

  … . … . … . … . … . … ..

  I watched their rich attire:

  Blue, glossy green, and shining black,

  … and every track

  Was a flash of golden fire.

  O happy living things! no tongue

  Their beauty might declare:

  A spring of love gushed from my heart,

  And I blessed them unaware:

  … . … . … . … ...

  And I blessed them unaware.

  The self-same moment I could pray;

  And from my neck so free

  The Albatross fell off, and sank

  Like lead into the sea.

  Thus the Mariner, having opened to appreciate all creatures, is relieved from the curse and burden of having destroyed a benign being and thus having brought disaster to his fellow men. A wind comes up and the ship is magically propelled homeward. Coleridge seemed concerned with our crimes against nature, seeing nature as God’s work and thus closely tied to humanity. And so those resonant lines

  The spirit who bideth by himself

  In the land of mist and snow,

  He loved the bird that loved the man

  Who shot him with his bow.

  And later in the poem,

  He prayeth best, who loveth best

  All things both great and small;

  For the dear God, who loveth us,

  He made and loveth all.

  This idea of the connection of all living beings through God was a major theme. And in 1817, Coleridge evoked an even more direct and intimate connection within the family of life by writing, “Every Thing has a Life of its own, & … we are all one Life.”

  Coleridge was not the only person who felt the attractive power of albatrosses. Even in scientific nomenclature, people repeatedly freighted the birds with metaphor and meaning, draping them with everything from heroic virtue to fear and foreboding. Thus the genus name scientifically denoting most albatrosses is the Latin Diomedea. Diomedes was one of Homer’s war heroes. During one campaign he so offended the goddess of wisdom, Athene, that in retribution she beset his fleet with a terrifying storm. When, rather than acting contrite, some of his crew further taunted the goddess, she transformed them into large white birds, “gentle and virtuous.” The genus of dark-plumaged Sooty Albatrosses, Phoebetria, derives from the Latin phoebetron, an object of terror, and the Greek phoibetria, a prophetess or soothsayer. Exulans, the Wandering Albatross’s specific name, means “out of one’s country,” or to live in exile. That may be how the mariners and naturalists who saw them felt on multiyear voyages—but the albatrosses themselves were always quite at home on the wild, wide ocean.

  In the metaphors we make of the creatures of the heavens and the deep, we often project our imagery, imbuing them with our own reflection. But the world is more than a coloring book of shapes for us to fill in. When we perceive metaphor in reality we enhance our understanding of ourselves, but when we install meanings instead of seeing reality, we miss all the true texture and inherent value, like a child doodling over a great painting. Loading up an animal like an albatross with our own fears and symbols is a bit unfair—unfair to the animal, who suffers the bias or false impressions we’ve created, and unfair to us. We miss the expansive opportunity of knowing other creatures. Why force albatrosses to wear humans around their necks? Sometimes an albatross is simply a bird. When we see that, worlds open—and even the metaphors that find us become more interesting.

  AND SO WE’VE COME to meet the albatrosses and all the other creatures on their own terms, in their own time. This year, as usual, most albatrosses arrived in November and by December had laid their eggs. Males began arriving first, perhaps a week before females. When previously mated albatrosses reconnect, they generally skip the elaborate dancing of their youthful past. With little preliminary courtship formality, older, well-acquainted mates copulate within as little as an hour of their reunion.

  They then go to sea on a “honeymoon” averaging ten days, while the female acquires bodily resources for building an egg. No one knows whether they feed each other chocolates out there during this time—or even stay together at all—but they often return to the island within a few hours of each other. Upon arrival back at the colony, the female usually lays her egg within a day.

  None of this orderly progression is apparent here on the island. Your main impression
is bewildering busyness, birds constantly coming and going.

  After the female lays, she leaves in a hurry—usually the same day. Her need to immediately get back to sea for food reflects how expensive egg laying is. Probably because of the inequitable cost to her body condition of constructing that large egg, the male takes a larger overall share of incubation, sitting about a week longer than the female when you sum all their time. When the male takes the first incubation shift, he sits, sits, sits three solid weeks on the egg, until she returns. Then she takes possession of the egg, and he goes to sea two or three weeks. After that, the spells grow shorter: something like a couple weeks back on the egg for the male, then a week or so for Mom, maybe followed by a few more days for Dad.

  With all that alternating activity and inactivity, their bodily condition fluctuates dramatically. Albatrosses first arrive plump and sassy, with thick layers of fat under their skin and around their organs. Laysan males show up weighing nearly seven and a half pounds and females close to seven. For the first ten days or so, the male doesn’t eat enough to maintain his weight, and loses mass until he weighs about the same as the female. He regains much of this during the “honeymoon” at sea. When the honeymoon is over, the female instantly loses 10 to 12 percent of her body weight laying that big egg. She gains it back at sea during the male’s first incubation shift. Meanwhile, he’s incubating without food or water, getting lighter again. During the long bouts of incubation, they fluctuate inversely, each in turn losing roughly 20 percent of their weight on the nest, while their mate out at sea is regaining much of its condition.

  During normal incubation, after about five or six parental shifts and an elapsed time of over two months, the male has sat for about thirty-six days and the female for twenty-nine. Those are averages for Laysan Albatrosses; they vary. (One whose mate was killed just after she laid her egg sat for thirty-two days—instead of the usual single day.) After about sixty-five days of incubation, the chick stages its grueling, slow-motion breakout. In the twenty-four hours—or sometimes several days—during which the chick struggles to emerge, the adult will render only abundant moral support and no physical or material assistance—a model of perfect parenting.

  Albatrosses are good at staying alive. About 65 percent of eggs, on average, result in chicks that survive to fledging age. About 10 percent die at the perilous transition to first flight. Of those that survive fledging, annual survival is often an extraordinary 93 to 98 percent through at least age twenty. Many albatrosses live much longer. Scientists aren’t sure exactly how long yet, because a lot of albatrosses still living have been wearing leg bands for forty years, outlasting some of the original researchers who wished to know.

  MOST ALBATROSSES HERE are incubating solitarily, but some have company sitting or standing inches away. Some sit touching bill to bill. The companions might be mates just returned from sea, waiting their turn at incubating. Or they might be visitors. Albatross social relationships are complicated, poorly understood.

  “Look,” says Dave. “This bird is sitting on an egg, and somebody else just walked up to it and started preening it around the head, and it accepted the preening. What does that mean? The bird is almost certainly not its mate. But they may have long-term relationships that are very cryptic to us.” As we watch the interaction, Dave continues, “The birds may know each other. One might be the offspring of the other, hatched here years ago. Or they could be acquaintances, and they might become mates at some time in the future if something bad happens to the mate of the bird that’s on the egg. That kind of stuff is very obscure to us. The only way you can get at it is long-term, by watching season after season—trying to see how these relationships are developing. But that’s really hard to do. With long-lived seabirds, I think a lot of it is about relationships.” Dave adds that a student of his just finished a long study of divorce in Masked Boobies. “He learned that if you’re a booby and you and your mate split up, you’re much less likely to breed next year.” Dave says biologists tend to collect data on the number of eggs, number of chicks hatching, number surviving in the nest, that sort of thing, but not very much on relationships. “Virtually everything about human society is about relationships,” Dave says, “and I think we are missing a lot by not putting more effort into trying to understand relationships in societies of other animals.”

  Though most albatrosses have spent the last months incubating, many are still courting. These are probably nonbreeders, but it’s not always clear what their status is. As you walk along, you see them engaged in different kinds of courtship, from quiet mutual preening to raucous, reckless dancing. Watching them is delightful and intellectually challenging. Dave, observing that some of the birds here are non-breeding adults, wonders aloud how adults decide whether to breed in a given year.

  Anthony, explaining the main emerging finding of his developing research, says that these albatrosses can’t raise a chick and regrow all their feathers in the same year, because each task requires almost as much energy as an albatross can earn by foraging. Trying to do both would result in energetic bankruptcy—starvation. So after one or more years of breeding they have to take a year off to molt their feathers. There’s an important implication. One of the most important things that will decide what will happen to these albatrosses is how many chicks a bird can produce during its life. Most people have assumed they breed every year, from when they first mature to when they die. Anthony says, “But skipping breeding in years when they’re molting will really affect total lifetime reproduction. Understanding this is important for calculating whether or not albatross populations will grow or decline in response to things like the numbers of birds being killed by fishing boats.” Anthony gestures to the birds around us and continues, “Albatrosses themselves have to know when their mate needs to skip a year, and when their mate is ready to breed. Otherwise the pairs will get out of phase with each other.”

  How can they communicate such information to each other? Dave and Anthony both agree that there are many things we don’t understand about the lives of animals that live a long time.

  LETTING THE OTHERS WALK AHEAD, I sit—albatross eye level—at the edge of the coral-powder runway and watch something so strange it seems familiarly human. This pair has been sitting next to each other for many long minutes, nibbling tenderly around each other’s faces, taking turns preening each other with extraordinary gentleness, each bird soaking it up as though this is the greatest luxury. Right now one bird is working the small feathers right around the other’s eye. The recipient turns its head sideways so the first bird can reach its cheek. Its throat. Watching them preening so delicately, enjoying it with eyes closed, you sense this is as immensely pleasurable for them as it would be for us—something anyone who has ever been tenderly touched would recognize.

  With extraordinary gentleness and trust—Black-footed Albatrosses

  Not all the courting implies partnership intentions. Some birds are preening in threesomes. And several little clubs of up to half a dozen adolescents or non-nesting birds are displaying or interacting together. Many of the courting birds are immature. Juveniles remain at sea for several years, then visit the breeding island for several additional years of courtship before acquiring a mate and themselves breeding. Laysans first breed at eight to nine years of age, usually. So these displaying birds may be adolescents just practicing, or maturing birds getting serious about the future. If the latter, they are forming a true bond that will bring them back next year to mate and invest in the months-long struggle of raising their first chick.

  I resume walking. Every few steps brings a new sight that expands my appreciation of albatrosses’ unusually complex behaviors. Two non-breeders are playing house with a cold, abandoned egg. One attempts awkwardly to sit on it, perhaps getting a feel for being grown-up. I’ve done a lot of research with seabirds, but I’ve never heard of anything quite like this apparent role-playing with a found egg.

  By far the most complicated part of albatross
courtship is the elaborate and prolonged dancing that goes on for months. Quite a few birds that aren’t breeding are dancing. One albatross waddlingly approaches another with its neck outstretched and its head pointed down, its throat quivering out a high wavering whistle. The other responds in kind. They engage in a bout of beak-to-beak touching, shaking their heads back and forth as if saying no but meaning yes. They begin to dance, their movements together intensifying in speed and emphasis.

  Albatross shake-rattle-and-roll dances look like a game of Simon Says, but with everything done so fast, it’s often impossible to tell who’s leading. Simon says head up. Simon says head down. Simon says vigorously pump your head. Simon says bray like a donkey. Simon says throw your bill straight upward to the sky and scream your wavering whistle. Simon says suddenly get on your tippytoes while your bill is up, and moo. Simon says clack your bill like somebody snapping closed a wooden jewelry box. Simon says clack so fast it sounds like a rolling r. Clack while shaking your head side to side and wailing. Simon says lay your head against your partner’s neck and clack so fast you drum-roll like a castanet; Simon says switch sides instantly. Simon says snap your bill to your wrist and flare one wing. Flare both gorgeous wings. Alternate flared wings and head pumping. Alternate now with bill drumming. Faster. Simon says walk slowly, high-stepping, with head going up and down. Simon says strut in a circle around each other, take deep bows, now point skyward. Simon says pump your body. Simon says wing out sideways. Flare wings and moo!—ooh how beautiful. Nice new feathers!