Eye of the Albatross: Visions of Hope and Survival

by Carl Safina

  Into the tape Patty punches several holes, then carefully ties the transmitter to the tape with Teflon ribbon. A spot of instant glue fixes the knots. The process is repeated in the aft section of the transmitter. This effort is all concentration. It involves no idle chitchat, no jokes. Because of this, all goes smoothly. In a few minutes the transmitter is rather elegantly attached to the albatross’s feathers. Patty smooths and preens Amelia’s plumage. Her new antenna sticks out.

  When we’re ready to release Amelia, Laura carefully unwraps her egg. Dave puts Amelia near her nest. We all back away. Amelia takes a step toward the egg, stretches, and waves her great wings a few times. She stands over the nest, then bends down, talking to the egg in low and confiding tones. Then Amelia rises tall, flares her feathers to expose her brood patch, settles down, stretches her bill to the sky, and moos like a contented cow. She spends a few minutes preening but never fusses with the transmitter.

  Laura walks to the next Laysan Albatross we’ve chosen. The bird is dozing. Laura places her hand gently over the bird’s bill, then smoothly and competently sweeps it up with her other arm and carries it to the barracks porch. This bird struggles a bit more than Amelia did. When we’re done transmittering the bird, Dave places it a few feet from its egg. It seems so broody, so programmed to incubate without moving, that it doesn’t want to take a single step. Dave kneels next to it, and it backs away from him into the nest, but sits beside the egg. It seems wobbly on its feet; perhaps because it’s been sitting for days, possibly weeks. It takes six long minutes—a seeming eternity to us but probably a mere moment to a bird in this meditative mind-set—before it stands and takes the final step, flares its brood patch, and sits squarely on the oval egg.

  Our third bird is a Black-footed Albatross, a large male. As Dave lifts it, it defecates directly on his T-shirt, making the shirt’s sentiment, “Biology reeks,” true in a literal sense. “Ow!” Dave says after an unsuccessful attempt to get the rubber band around the agitated bird’s bill. These birds can bite.”

  Bite they do. Laura’s got numerous scars on her arms, and Patty shows off her own recent marks. Like sailors’ tattoos, the scars all come with stories. “They’ll bite anywhere: fingers, arms—. Nipple bites are the worst.”

  The bird shakes his head and kicks. Dave says, “This guy is a handful. Jeez, it’s fierce.”

  Laura, hair loose over her shoulders, concentrates on holding the albatross’s wings and feet. When the bird struggles, Laura offers a silent “shhh” with her lips. She says, “It’s really interesting, the different personalities they have.”

  The rambunctious bird utters three short grunting bellows and spits out the stick he had been biting. Dave resituates the albatross in his lap.

  Patty concentrates on putting on the transmitter.

  Dave observes that the feathers on Black-foots are shorter and denser than on Laysans. That suggests they might go to different parts of the ocean. I guess we’ll see.

  Until now, we’ve all been focused entirely on the birds and the transmittering. But as Dave watches Patty finish up, I suddenly notice about fifty bird lice well on their way to exploring Dave’s shirt and shorts, reinforced by about twenty more lice just beginning their heroic trek from the present albatross to Dave’s body. In fact, at least four species of lice and blood-sucking flies are moving up Dave’s chest.

  “Excuse me, Dave,” I say. “You’re covered in parasites.”

  “Am I?” He looks down for confirmation. Patty looks up for confirmation.

  Still holding the albatross, Dave begins pulling the lice off with one hand. Patty, dedicated student that she is, helps.

  Dave mumbles jokingly, “I hope I don’t get any on the birds.”

  This would be full-on gross if there were any chance at all that these bird parasites would bite or infest a human—even a biologist. That they won’t is one of the practical glories of evolutionary adaptation on a small scale; the parasites are so finely adapted to the seabirds that they aren’t interested in people.

  Dave says, “Well, that’s one good thing we’ve done for the albatrosses—they have a lot fewer lice than before we handled them.”

  Patty continues helping Dave pull the invaders from his shirt. Dave chuckles as he pauses to pinch a louse from Patty’s face. The moment of mutual nit-picking—perhaps the most ancient, time-honored social-bonding institution among primates—provides a rare opportunity for Patty to tease her adviser, and she says to Dave, “You don’t need to worry too much about the lice, because you have no hair.”

  Dave responds, “That’s really nice, Patty. Are there any other lousy things you’d like to say?”

  When we’re done with science and hygiene—and the lowbrow slapstick that passes for high parasite-comedy in the mid-Pacific—Dave takes the big dark albatross to his nest and places him directly on his egg. He doesn’t fluff, rouse, settle, or shake. Just sits down tight.

  Dave says, “Well, that went quite well.” He’s pleased with the birds, and he’s proud of Patty. As Patty and the others gather the equipment, Dave remarks to me, “Patty has done great. Three years ago she was just like many other girls in Ecuador, but since then her horizons have really broadened. She has worked in the Galápagos on research, come to North Carolina on her first trip abroad, entered our master’s program, learned to speak English well, come to Hawaii, begun her own research, and met an English guy and gone to visit him in the U.K. That’s a big three years for any young woman. The only thing is—and this is probably cultural—I want her to learn not to defer to me so much. For a young Ecuadorian woman, deference to male authority is the norm. I’d like to see her more comfortable with questioning my decisions and disagreeing with me.”

  AT TEN O’CLOCK we take a moment’s rest on the porch. Amelia is dozing just a few feet away. Her transmitter is hidden by feathers, its antenna barely showing. A noddy lands on the porch rail near my arm.

  The weather has been unseasonably warm—abnormally hot, actually—the air unusually still. More typically, continuous winds blow here. But now the heat is intense, and the sitting birds are showing the strain. They are clearly uncomfortable under the pressing tropic sun. Many have raised the feathers on their backs like louvers, trying to radiate heat. Some albatrosses have recently deserted. Either the mate’s dead, or the heat has gotten to them.

  Dave doesn’t want to put on any more transmitters or handle any more albatrosses until the weather changes. He asks Patty’s opinion. Patty says, in recently acquired English, “Well, because albatrosses lay only one egg, and they seem they don’t breed every year, you have to try to make sure you don’t cause more problems to any bird. So let’s wait.”

  While everyone goes inside to eat, I linger on the porch, savoring existence. Beyond the lagoon and reef, the ocean rolls placid and eternal, pacific as ever. Until it meets the reef: Right now the swell on the north side of the island is piling a ten-foot surf. You can see but not feel the violence, because the breakers exhaust their energy by pounding the resolutely resisting reef. Each rolling swell that has wrinkled the sea surface for thousands of miles unfurls itself here, becoming a breaker for a moment or two, taking everything that went before and turning it into something new, different, spectacular, and brief. Ah yes, brief. As Virgil said, “Death plucks my ear and says, ‘Live!—I am coming.’”

  LUNCHTIME. Inside the barracks, Patty and Dave are prepping tacos and empanadas. Anthony is having trouble deciding between making pea soup with popcorn in it or veggie chili. He’s a vegetarian because, he says, he has ethical objections to how animals are treated in industrial agriculture. “In many cases, the way animals are made to live is worse than how they’re made to die.” He doesn’t usually eat seafood, either. “I don’t like what the fishing industry is doing. For instance, you know how, for every pound of shrimp they catch, they often kill and dump about five pounds of small fish? That pains me somehow in my gut, so I don’t buy it.”

  The freckled blonde, Karen
Fischer, is a University of Colorado biology undergraduate with a proclivity for multiple earrings. Aged twenty, Karen has already traveled in: “Let’s see; Ecuador, Peru, the Galapagos, Belize, and Costa Rica—oh, and Europe.” After this stint at Tern Island, she’ll head to New Zealand for a study-abroad program. Why the travel bug? “When my sister was fifteen she died of cancer. She missed out on so much, I feel kind of owe it to her to try to do and see as many things as possible.” In memory of her sister, Karen has a little forget-me-not flower tattooed on her ankle.

  Someone pops Aretha Franklin into the boom box, and everybody starts bobbing while gobbling Karen’s fresh muffins and making lunches from leftovers. One thing you quickly sense about the people here: they include more than the average proportion of idealists and self-motivated seekers. But they’re all pretty down-to-earth. The work demands a lot of physical and mental effort. Slackers don’t make it this far.

  EMERGENT LANDS HAVE COME and gone in the location we call Hawaii for nearly seventy million years. These are islands not so much lost in time as lost to time. The Hawaiian Islands and the Northwest Hawaiian Islands have all been moving constantly westward toward the setting sun on an immense conveyor belt of rock, drifting on the moving Pacific Plate like puffs of smoke in a breeze. Most are in late senescence and on the way out. Beyond the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, in fact, lie ancient drowned former islands known as the Emperor Seamount chain. Those deposed Emperors, many tens of millions of years old, lie so stooped and eroded they no longer graze or grace the sea surface.

  All Hawaiian islands past and present trace their parentage to the same volcanic hot spot, a deep, stationary point in the mantle of the planet that generates heat intense enough to partly melt the overriding Pacific Plate and force magma through it. (Only a handful of similar hot spots exist on Earth, including those beneath the Galapagos Islands and the Azores.) This spot is still giving fire-and-brimstone birth to the Big Island and building the newest future island, which has yet to surface for air. Only about half the volcanoes thus created break the surface. But some, at a total height of thirty thousand feet from sea floor to summit, stand among this planet’s most massive mountains.

  As they all drown in their slow procession west, they will be “replenished” by the birth of new islands. Kure Atoll, at the end of the island chain, was born about thirty million years ago and is now far from home, roughly 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) from the hot place where it was first expelled from Mother Earth. The most distant Emperor seamount has drifted 2,900 miles (4,700 kilometers) and lies near the Aleutians. Seventy-five million years ago, it was born of the same hot spot that conceived the current embryonic member of the family, Lo’ihi, right where Lo’ihi is now. Lo’ihi is growing from the sea floor twelve miles southeast of Hawaii’s Big Island. Its birth above the surface—requiring another thousand meters of vertical gestation—would make it the newest baby Hawaiian island. This will likely take somewhere between two thousand years (in which case humans will probably witness it) and twenty thousand years (twice as long as civilization has existed). Lo’ihi is an active little baby, kicking at a rate of one thousand undersea earthquakes per year, and venting water twice the normal boiling temperature.

  Long before scientific studies, ancient Hawaiians, by noticing differences in erosion, soils, and vegetation, recognized that the islands to the northwest were older than those to the southeast. Instead of proposing hot spots in the mantle as the underlying cause, they reasoned that Pele, the goddess of volcanoes, had originally lived on the island of Kauai. When her older sister Namakaokahai, goddess of the sea, attacked her, Pele fled to Oahu. When forced to flee again, Pele moved southeast to Maui, then to Hawaii, her current address, where she now abides in the summit of the Kilauea Volcano. Pele’s stepwise flight from west to east, and her problems with her watery sister, conjure the continual struggle between the island’s volcanic growth and the tearing and wearing of the eternal sea and the rains upon the shores and shoulders of the islands. The mythology remains consistent with geologic knowledge developed centuries later. Preliterate people are often excellent at noticing relationships; science excels at explanations.

  WHEN SEA LEVELS WERE at a low point seventeen thousand years ago, during the last Ice Age, high tide was three hundred feet lower than it is today. Some of today’s barely drowned shallows and barely emergent atolls, like French Frigate Shoals, would have been substantial islands. Now there’s not much margin for error. In fact, if not for the magic of coral, many of the most bird-populated atolls would already have drowned. An atoll is a roughly circular island with a central lagoon, dependent on the upward growth of corals to keep its head above water. Today, many of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands are atolls. Some North Pacific atolls have been drilled to see how thick their coral cap is—it’s thick: thousands of feet at certain atolls.

  Charles Darwin, an even greater genius than most people realize, was also first to correctly figure out the evolution of atolls. As magma rises from a hot spot or a plate boundary in Earth’s mantle, a volcanic island forms. By the time formation ends (as when the island is conveyored away from the hot spot on a moving plate) the massive mountains have already begun eroding. Those Hawaiian islands that have moved west of the active volcanic zone have begun this process. Over two to five million years, while the mighty island begins subsiding, a ring of corals forms around the island. In five to ten million more years, as the island continues sinking, the coral forms a fringing reef. By ten to thirty million years, the island submerges just below the sea, leaving a ring of upwardly mobile growing coral reef and low islands around the perimeter, and a shallow lagoon in the center.

  As long as their corals can grow fast enough to keep pace with island sinkage and sea level rise, these will be islands and atolls. The place where the water becomes too cool for coral reefs’ growth to keep pace with sinkage—about 29° north latitude—is called the Darwin point. In the Hawaiian chain, it is no coincidence that Kure Atoll, at the extreme end of the Northwestern Islands, is both the last emergent island and the world’s northernmost atoll. This is the last place where coral growth can compensate for island subsidence. The sunken Emperor Seamounts are the drowned islands past this point, whose fossil corals, extinguished by too cool waters, still cap the submerged lands. This fate next awaits Kure, too, on its inexorable journey north, and the sea will eventually reclaim each island as it trips over the Darwin point.

  THE ALBATROSSES HAVE a deep history too. The earliest known fossil albatross is about twenty-five million years old. Albatross species similar to those now flying were coursing the seas sixteen million years ago. Albatrosses., and all the tube-nosed seabirds, descended from a common ancestor. That ancestor’s other descendants branched off to become different highly specialized families of aquatic birds. While one extreme line of seabird adaptation became the penguins, who entirely sacrificed flight for deep-diving ability (and turned their wings into finlike flippers that can no longer be folded), the tube-nosed seabirds invested everything in the ability to fly as far as possible over the oceans of Earth. Though they range almost limitlessly in any direction, the vertical lives of tube-nosed birds are severely compressed, seldom rising more than about fifty feet from the surface. While they travel distances unimaginable to us, altitude never occurs to an albatross. It’s as though by collapsing their world into just two dimensions—true Flatlanders—they maximize the spread of distance.

  In the eighteenth century the great biologist Carolus Linnaeus gave the tube-nosed seabird group its scientific name, Procellaria, from the Latin for storm or tempest. The group comprises roughly half of all seabirds, well over a hundred species, in several subgroupings. In size order: the storm-petrels (the smallest weighs under an ounce), diving-petrels, prions, larger petrels and shcarwaters, giant petrels, and albatrosses. The largest albatross is about 350 times the size of the smallest storm-petrel. The easiest way to remember what distinguishes albatrosses is that while other tube-nosed bird
s’ nostrils are fused atop the bill, albatrosses’ nostrils lie separated alongside their bill. And among tubenoses only the Giant Petrels rival some albatrosses in size. Albatrosses are big.

  Today albatrosses inhabit every open ocean except the North Atlantic. (Fossils from eastern North America and Europe show that albatrosses lived even there five million years ago.) Rare vagrant albatrosses do occasionally turn up in the North Atlantic. Two Black-browed Albatrosses appeared annually in Northern Gannet colonies in the Faroes and in Shetland for twenty-five years. Yellow-nosed Albatrosses are sighted from time to time off North America and Europe. But any Atlantic sighting north of the equator is extremely rare. Most bizarrely, a Wandering Albatross slipped through the Strait of Gibraltar, crashed onto the coast of Sicily, and was hit by a car and killed.

  Virtually all albatrosses spend most of their foraging time in seas between latitudes 30° and 55°. These are the great, windy regions of the oceans. The sole exception to this latitude rule is the Galapagos Albatross, which breeds near the equator and forages where the Humboldt Current streams cold water into the tropics off Peru and Ecuador. But it too relies on wind. Twenty of the twenty-four species of albatross live and breed in the Southern Ocean’s middle latitudes—including the “roaring forties” and “furious fifties.” That’s precisely because the sweeping gales that gust and bluster around the open seas at the bottom of the world energize these giants’ journeys. Wind, more than anything, defines where albatrosses live and go. All albatrosses are tied to remote islands for breeding, but between nesting they span long stretches of space and time, often years, at sea—propelled by that wind.