Eye of the Albatross: Visions of Hope and Survival

by Carl Safina

  Polynesian mariners developed skills unmatched in the world, abilities bordering on instinct. When far at sea, Polynesian navigators surmised the existence of land by the flight patterns and directionality of seabirds and migrating shorebirds, or by discerning subtle waves running across the main sea swell, reflected from distant, unseen islands. Large clouds appearing stationary while smaller ones drifted in the wind often betrayed the presence of land well beyond the horizon; the land’s effect on the atmosphere generated the standing clouds. Over atolls, clouds tinted green with the lagoon’s reflection became visible long before the low-lying sand islands did.

  Cook and other explorers remained amazed by the ability of certain Polynesians traveling aboard their vessels to stay oriented at sea, able to point toward home islands many hundreds of miles away. In 1769, in Tahiti, Cook took aboard the navigator Tupaia, who guided Cook three hundred miles south to the island of Rurutu. Cook then commanded the Endeavour westward on various courses to New Zealand, then Australia, then north through the Great Barrier Reef to New Guinea. Throughout the convolutions of these travels, Cook was continually dumbfounded to discover that whenever he asked Tupaia to point toward Tahiti, he could, without access to the ship’s charts or compass.

  Acute powers of observation and memory were the Polynesian navigator’s tools of the trade. Unlike Western systems of fixing position without reference to home port, Polynesians were home-oriented. The navigator mentally logged and integrated all courses steered and all weather and sea phenomena affecting movement of the canoe (requiring him to forgo sleep for long periods). He could trace these backward in his mind, so that at any time he could point in the approximate direction of home and estimate the sailing time required. Departing canoes used a succession of rising and setting positions of familiar stars for steering. During cloudy, dark, starless nights, dominant ocean swells indicated directionality. Upon discovery of a new island, the navigator carefully memorized its location with reference to stars rising, setting, and traveling directly overhead. Thus Polynesians sailed the known universe, and beyond.

  If Polynesians differed from Europeans while at sea, on land they were all too similar. Reaching island after island, Polynesians—and the pigs and rats that came with them—eradicated many seabirds by eating adults, eggs, and young. Hawaiians so savored Dark-rumped Petrel chicks that they reserved these only for the nobility. Though the Dark-rumped was the most abundant petrel on Oahu, oncoming appetites consumed the last one there. The Polynesians’ pigs rooted out entire colonies of burrow-nesting seabirds. It must have been a time of great horror for birds trapped in their dark burrows, snarfed to oblivion by snuffling snouts from another world. The Polynesians were such a catastrophe for wildlife that at least half of Hawaii’s endemic birds were already extinct before Captain Cook’s arrival pressed the first European bootprint into Hawaiian sand. (All Pacific islands surveyed by archaeologists suffered dramatic declines of land- and seabirds following the arrival of humans and their hitchhiking animals; Easter Island retains only one of the twenty-two seabird species that bred there.) Europeans would bring much more trouble.

  MUCH LATER THAN the Pacific peoples, Europeans developed ships capable of traveling into the albatrosses’ world. At the end of the 1700s, commercial ships from Europe and America began appearing in the Southern Hemisphere.

  From early on, albatrosses saved the lives of many Western mariners—albeit involuntarily. In 1881 a sailor who fell overboard from the ship Gladstone grabbed the first albatross that approached him and used it as a living life-buoy to stay afloat until the ship stopped, lowered a lifeboat, and rescued him. Castaways shipwrecked where few vessels ventured survived largely on albatrosses, sometimes for years. One gang of sealers was marooned on Solander Islands, south of New Zealand, from 1808 to 1813. Four men put ashore against their will on the Snares Islands in 1810 (48° S, 166° E) did not see another ship for seven years. Albatrosses helped feed them. When the sealer Princess of Wales wrecked on Île de la Possession in 1821, stranding its men for a year, Wandering Albatrosses kept them alive: “Their eggs are very large … about a pint … . The young … excellent for the table, and provided us with a very good dish for a long period, as they did not fly off until December.” In 1842 the whaler Parker struck Kure Atoll’s reef, and in the seven months until rescue, surviving men killed seven thousand seabirds and sixty Monk Seals. In what was surely the first conservation edict in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, the captain of the Saginaw, which in 1870 also went aground on Kure, limited his crew to twenty birds per day.

  In 1875 a woman named Florence Wordsworth was bound from London to New Zealand aboard the Strathmore when it wrecked on the Isles of the Apostles in the southern Indian Ocean’s Crozet group, drowning nearly half the passengers. She wrote, “I was stunned with cold, and almost fainting … till Charlie came with the reeking-hot skins of two albatrosses.” During seven months on the island, until they were rescued by an American whaler, they ate birds. After killing an albatross, one of the men wrote, “As is often the case before dying, it vomited up the contents of its bag, and amongst the mess was an eel quite perfect, having the appearance of being cooked. I took it and ate it, and it tasted quite like stewed eel.”

  In 1916, after drifting sea ice clenched and later crushed his ship Endurance, Ernest Shackleton and five companions made landfall at South Georgia Island after a desperate eight-hundred-mile, gale-plagued lifeboat trek to summon rescuers for their marooned crew. “There we found the nests of albatrosses … . The nestlings were fat and lusty, and we had no hesitation about deciding that they were destined to die at an early age … what a stew it was … . The young albatrosses weighed about fourteen pounds each fresh killed … . The flesh was white and succulent, and the bones, not fully formed, almost melted in our mouths.”

  You didn’t have to be shipwrecked to develop a taste for the great seabirds. On Captain James Cook’s second circumnavigation, in 1772, naturalist George Forster noted both their beauty and their utility: “They skim always on the surface of the sea … . When skinned, they afford a good palatable food.” George’s father, Reinhold, added, “We found them to be extremely curious … but they paid with their lives for this curiosity.” Cook himself wrote, “Shot some albatrosses and other Birds on which we feasted … and found them exceeding good.” Another of Cook’s naturalists, Joseph Banks, commented that the men “eat heartily of them tho there was fresh pork upon the table.”

  Explorers and sailors and, later, passengers on commercial ships learned early to catch albatrosses for their own craftwork, food, or amusement. Sealers and whalers made pipe stems of the long, hollow wing bones, tobacco pouches of the big webbed feet, and warm slippers from the downy skins. The egg occasionally found in females at sea was sometimes reserved for ships’ captains.

  Herman Melville, in Moby-Dick, had this impression:

  I remember the first albatross I ever saw. It was during a prolonged gale, in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas. From my forenoon watch below, I ascended to the overclouded deck; and there, dashed upon the main hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness … . At intervals, it arched forth its vast archangel wings, as if to embrace some holy ark. Wondrous flutterings and throbbings shook it … . It uttered cries, as some king’s ghost in supernatural distress. Through its inexpressible, strange eyes, methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God … . I bowed myself; the white thing was so white, its wings so wide, and in those for ever exiled waters, I had lost the miserable warping memories of traditions and of towns. Long I gazed at that prodigy of plumage … . How had the mystic thing been caught? Whisper it not, and I will tell; with a treacherous hook and line.

  The capture method was hardly secret. In 1594, Sir Richard Hawkins, approaching the Falkland Islands in the Dainty, wrote: “I caused a hooke and lyne to be brought to me … . One of the fowles being hungry presently seized upon it, and the hooke in his upper beake … . By the same manner of fishing, we
caught so many of them, as refreshed and recreated all my people for the day.”

  Such seabird “fishing” became frequent practice throughout the Southern Hemisphere. On passenger vessels, it caught the attention of the leisured class. One enthusiast of fishing for albatrosses from the deck of a ship in the 1860s considered the Wandering Albatross “the crowning triumph of the avian angler.” Yet another, singing the praises of “sporting after these noble birds,” described his excitement of catching seven Wanderers in one day.

  A morning’s catch aboard the Sobraon on a voyage to Australia from England, 1890-91. F. D. Green (courtesy Mitchell Library, Sydney, Australia)

  On deck, the birds were often tormented and bullied. One G. Bennett wrote that after being brought on deck, the massive bird “remains the patient, stupid-looking subject of a hundred passing remarks: the ladies give their due share of praise to its large bright eyes, fine sleek and clean plumage; the expansion of wings is duly measured … the bird, during the time remaining, sitting … very sulky … until a few practical jokes keep its bright eyes on the alert against all personal attacks. After having been admired and pitied … by the fair sex … it is consigned either … to be stuffed; or sometimes regains its liberty.”

  A slightly kinder pastime involved catching albatrosses, marking them with things like colored ribbons, and releasing them to see how long they would follow the ship. Most followed for only an hour or so, but in 1856 one Wanderer trailed for six days—and a Sooty Albatross followed a ship for 4,645 kilometers (2,880 miles).

  Better guns and newer notions of “sport” were advances for the worse, as hook-and-lining fell into obsolescence and shooting albatrosses became popular on passenger ships. Passenger traffic soon grew so heavy that killing at sea for the amusement of ships’ passengers significantly affected the numbers of Wandering Albatrosses. In the century between 1780 and 1880, about 1.3 million free immigrants sailed from Europe to Australia. In the year 1875 alone, ninety-three ships took thirty thousand immigrants to New Zealand. By the mid-1800s, a vessel from New York or Boston was arriving in San Francisco every eleven days or so, having traveled by way of the albatross-rich waters around Cape Horn. One nineteenth-century enthusiast noted that an albatross “sails in the most marvellous manner, keeping beautifully even pace with the vessel … and it is a curious fact that no amount of noise or close whirr of bullets appears to have the slightest effect on an albatross.” (Until it got hit, of course.)

  Some onlookers were offended by such shooting. Among them was the Reverend William Scoresby, who during a sea passage in 1859 wrote that the rear deck of the Royal Charter “was yesterday occupied with ‘sportsmen’ … firing at the unconscious elegant birds gracefully hovering about … I fancy 50 to 100 shots were fired, happily with rare instances of their taking effect; but in one case I saw, on being induced to look astern … a poor stricken bird struggling on the surface of the water apparently mortally wounded. This useless infliction of injury and suffering … where there was no chance of obtaining them … for any use, was to my feelings, and, I believe the feelings of many others, particularly painful.” Someone who was not averse to capturing albatrosses with hook and line (because the birds could be used) might be put off by the waste involved in shooting them from the deck of a moving vessel. Another such person wrote, “Often, with broken wings, they are left to linger on the wide expanse of waters … until death puts a period to their miseries. It is revolting to the feelings to see these beautiful and perfectly innocent birds destroyed, solely to gratify the inclination to destroy.”

  One passenger traveling from England to New Zealand in 1841 wrote, “We had an interesting discussion at lunch, whether it was justifiable to shoot those birds merely for wantonness and amusement, when it is impossible to reach them after they are dead. I had only Mr. Otterson and Mr. Barnicoat on my side of the question … . It was agreed by the sportsmen that they were justified to continue the sport if only for practice.” Killing from ships faded as vessels became too big and fast for hauling in big birds on lines, and safety regulations put an end to passengers discharging firearms. By 1860, the same G. Bennett who had written so sarcastically about the pitying tendencies of the fairer sex felt compelled to admit, “It has been remarked by many voyagers that the large Wandering Albatros [sic] has been during the last few years more rarely seen.”

  WHEN EUROPEANS WENT ASHORE distant islands, it was usually with the specific purpose of killing the animals. It might be overstatement to say that the highs seas and low islands were soon overrun with people intent on killing albatrosses. But to the birds it might have seemed that way, as people at sea and ashore began taking many thousands of albatrosses and their nestlings for feathers, meat, and oil.

  In 1798, Matthew Flinders was aboard the Norfolk, exploring the Tasmanian environs. On December 9, the day the crew brought the first boatload of seals off one island, he wrote, “there are vast numbers of albatrosses on the isle to which their name is given, which were tending young … and being unacquainted with the power or disposition of man, did not fear him: we taught them their first lesson of experience.”

  The sealers first exterminated Albatross Island’s fur seals, then the “disposition of man” turned its full and terrible attention to the albatrosses for their feathers. They killed 99 percent of the birds (the birds’ long periods at sea must have saved the last survivors). Thousands of carcasses rotted, and the birds in their numbers have never recovered.

  The misplaced trust shown by the naive albatrosses—the absence of the capacity for fear, really—earned them derisive nicknames from sailors who saw their lack of fright as stupidity. They called the Southern Hemisphere species “mollymawks,” probably from the Dutch mal (foolish) and mok (gull). In the North Pacific they called them “gooney birds”; in Japan, “fool birds.” The implication, of course, was that any animal that did not expect the worst from humans was a fool.

  Falkland Islands sealers delivered albatross eggs by the thousands to the Stanley markets. On the Tristan da Cunha group in the South Atlantic, throughout the twentieth century settlers annually took several thousand albatross eggs and chicks for the pot. (As late as 1980 the locals killed penguins for lobster bait.) The birds were finally protected in 1986. By then, the Gough Wandering Albatross had been eliminated from the main island. Two hundred miles southeast, on Gough Island itself, sealers virtually exterminated the fur seals during the 1800s, then boiled penguins for their oil. Likewise, on Australia’s Macquarie Island (54° S, 158° E), for three decades hundreds of thousands of nesting penguins were herded up ramps and tumbled into boiling vats for their oil. When you land there nowadays, the ugly giant pots, abandoned in 1919, still stand, rusting. Surrounding the cauldrons live dense crowds of Royal and King Penguins—the survivors’ descendants. Their gentle curiosity toward human visitors to this remote shore is so touching that the inhumanity of what was done to them is difficult to fathom.

  In the North Pacific, albatrosses have endured several catastrophic periods. Feather hunters killed millions of nesting birds during the late 1800s and early 1900s, eliminating colonies altogether from several islands. That brought the Short-tailed Albatross to extinction’s doorstep. After this stopped, North Pacific populations struggled slowly upward. Then for three decades preceding, during, and after World War II, U.S. military operations brought persecution at Midway, the world’s largest albatross colony, killing tens of thousands of albatrosses, causing them to decline again there. North Pacific populations generally expanded from the mid-1960s through the 1980s, until the rampant drift-netting in the 1980s and into the 1990s killed roughly a quarter million albatrosses. Now, in the North Pacific and around the world, the miles-long longlines lacing the seas with millions of baited hooks are the main threat.

  Even today a few fishermen in some places kill albatrosses as “pests” or for bait, or use their feathers for fishing lures. Australian fishermen were as recently as the 1900s still shooting about six hundred Wander
ing Albatrosses annually. And the birds also get shot off South Africa, South America, and elsewhere. Uruguayan longline fishers still sometimes decide to float a short line with a baited hook on each end, amusing themselves by the sight of two suddenly doomed birds struggling against each other. Birds unlucky enough to be brought aboard alive on the longline are sometimes killed brutally; the fishers twist their wings and throw them into the water. Those boats catch Swordfish and tuna, destined for a restaurant near you.

  ANTHONY SAYS HE NEEDS to check some of his birds, so I volunteer to assist him. Anthony has worked here for several years, including a stint as manager of the place. He’s now thirty, and a graduate student at the University of Washington.

  Anthony’s research is an attempt to understand the Black-footed Albatrosses’ threshold for taking a year off from breeding in order to grow new feathers, and how the members of the pair stay synchronized over skipped years. He’s trying to predict who’ll return next year by examining how worn out their feathers are.

  The large flight feathers of albatross wings bear more microscopic frills on their interlocking barbules than any other known feathers. That toughens them, but they still take an extraordinary beating from punishing winds, sun, and salt water. Anthony explains, “Feathers are either new and shiny chocolate brown; or what I call ‘class two,’ which are duller brown and slightly worn; or ‘class 3,’ which are bleached lighter brown and brittle, with edges very frayed. The sixth and seventh primary flight feathers seem to take a beating. They’re a strong indicator of where the bird is in its molt process.” Anthony can look at a bird’s wing and say things like, “Looks like it replaced these four feathers last year and did a full molt the year before that.” Ultimately, as he explains, understanding how many years albatrosses actually breed is the only way to understand their lifetime reproductive potential.