The Thing with Feathers (29 page)

And albatrosses? Like us, they are long-lived, and put a lot of effort into raising their offspring. Unlike us, their divorce rate hovers near zero percent, probably the lowest of any bird. Zero percent! Albatrosses make us look like freewheeling swingers. They also have relatively low rates of extra-pair paternity—chicks fathered by a different parent—though in one study researchers found that up to one in five wandering albatross chicks did not match the DNA of its father. Those scientists hypothesized that sneaky mating behavior acts as an escape valve for females trapped in long-term relationships, and helps cut down on inbreeding. For an albatross, divorce is not usually a valid option; splitting up would mean a loss of several years, because it takes a long time for these birds to pick a mate. They have to get it right the first time. Everything an albatross does, it does deliberately—especially when it comes to love.

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THE LIFE OF AN ALBATROSS
is all about patience. After a wandering albatross hatches, it spends a full nine months sitting alone as a chick in its nest, most of that time in quiet contemplation of its surroundings because it has no siblings. It grows slowly. The chick’s mother and father are hardworking absentee parents, combing the distant oceans for food and only occasionally returning to the nest to make a quick dinner delivery. Finally, one day, when the young albatross decides it’s ready, it stretches its untested wings and glides out to sea without guidance, to spend the next six years alone, patrolling the most windswept regions of the Southern Ocean. Remarkably, during those first few years of its life, the solitary bird will probably never pass within sight of land.

At about age six, the albatross returns to its home island for the sole purpose of finding a mate. Other adolescent albatrosses also appear from points remote, and things suddenly liven up. After many years at sea without much social interaction, they get together on solid ground—and begin to dance.

The courtship dance of a wandering albatross is complicated, haunting, and humbling to witness. It’s very different from the dancing YouTube birds and the boy-band-loving parrots mentioned in an earlier chapter. Two birds face each other, patter their feet to stay close as they move forward and backward, testing each other’s reflexes, and point their beaks at the sky. Then, as they simultaneously utter a chilling scream, the albatrosses each extend their wings to show off the full twelve-foot span, facing off while continuing to jockey for position. They touch beaks, throw their heads back again, and scream as if no one were watching—which is usually the case, because the birds nest on only a handful of remote and inhospitable
southern islands. The courtship dance can continue for several minutes, with the birds responding to each other’s cues like a pair of ballroom pros.

When young albatrosses first begin dancing, they instinctively know the moves but transition awkwardly from one to the next. Practice makes perfect, even in the albatross world. Very young birds group up in gangs of half a dozen, facing inward in a ragged ring like high schoolers at the prom. They watch one another closely, mirroring one another’s sequences and gradually improving their own personal style. As the birds smooth out their technique, they focus on a few preferred dance partners, spending more time in smaller groups until, eventually, each albatross narrows the field down to just one other individual, which will become its mate. By that time, it has spent so much time dancing with that specific bird—it can take years to pick the perfect partner—that the pair’s sequence of moves is as unique as a lover’s fingerprint. If you were to write down exactly how they executed their dance, you would see that each pair does things slightly differently but performs the motions the same every time.

After albatrosses settle down with a lifetime partner, their dancing days are numbered. They perform bits of the sequence to greet each other from time to time, but as the years slip past, each pair spends less time dancing and more time raising their chicks. When they commit, they quit the singles scene and move on to the next stage of their lives.

Between the adolescent years at sea and subsequent years of dancing, a wandering albatross might be fifteen years old by the time it nests for the first time. From then on, it will generally stick faithfully with its mate until one of them dies, which might not be for another fifty years. (Some people believe that albatrosses occasionally reach one hundred, but we don’t really
know, because nobody has studied them that long. The oldest recorded wild albatrosses have been documented raising chicks past age sixty.) Those years are lived slowly, deliberately, at the pace of an imponderable environment. There are few distractions in the life of an albatross, so the birds concentrate on things that matter most—such as one another.

Although albatrosses form long-term partnerships, the time they spend with their mate is limited. The birds nest at most every other year; because the process of raising a chick takes so long, they can’t pull it off every summer. When they’re not nesting, the albatrosses patrol the high seas across endless miles and vast expanses of ocean. At sea, pairs don’t stick together—it would be too easy to get visually separated, and they’d have to spend too much energy keeping track of each other’s whereabouts. So even the most committed partners habitually spend months at a time alone, without knowing what their mates are up to.

Nobody knows how pairs of albatrosses decide when to meet after these long intervals apart. Sometimes they skip a year between nesting seasons, sometimes two. But invariably, each shows up on the nesting island at about the same time, almost as if the date were prearranged. The first meeting is businesslike; if both birds are healthy, they’ll get right down to work. Male albatrosses generally gather the nest material; females do the interior decorating. When the female lays an egg, she loses about 10 percent of her body weight—wandering albatross eggs are four inches long and weigh more than a pound. The male takes the first, longest incubation shift while the female goes to sea to replenish lost calories, and then they switch at regular intervals until the egg hatches. Both parents feed the chick until it is old enough to fly away.

The entire nesting process takes about a year, but the parents
spend most of that time apart as well. They see each other to mate and build the nest together, but as the season continues, they stay at sea for increasingly long intervals. During incubation of the egg, they must wait for each other to trade places (in one case, when an albatross died at sea, its widowed mate sat on an infertile egg for 108 days before finally giving up). But once the chick can stay warm on its own, each parent comes and goes on its personal schedule and the two rarely encounter each other at the nest.

For most of the year, their relationships are strictly long-distance. Doesn’t seem very romantic, does it?

But think again. Albatrosses are world travelers by nature. They’re never going to settle down like some farm chicken. Yet they manage to maintain relationships spanning oceans and decades, with little infidelity and virtually no breakups. These birds don’t have cell phones to stay in touch; they spend months at a time pursuing a solitary existence at sea, not even knowing whether their partner is still alive, with only hope and expectation that they might meet again on some desolate isle when the time comes. Not many humans could make that situation work. Albatross pairs rely on a nearly unbreakable bond to stay committed through time and space. Do they think fondly of each other while winging so many millions of miles alone? The more I ponder the lifestyle of an albatross, the more fabulously romantic it seems.

The birds certainly make the most of their limited time together at the nest. They often sleep with the head of one bird cozily pillowed against the breast of its mate. Pairs habitually rest side by side, sometimes preening the fine feathers on each other’s heads with the tender caresses of the most careful lovers. Different people report seeing various things deep in the inky-black eyes of an albatross—wisdom, serenity,
wilderness, peace, endurance—which are well and good, but all I see is love.

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MOST PEOPLE PASS
their entire lives without seeing a single albatross. Case in point: Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In 1798, he penned his best-known poem,
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
, which popularized the conception of albatrosses as bad luck—although in the poem the curse arose from the
killing
of an albatross. Coleridge never saw one of the birds in the flesh. He fabricated the story based on mariners’ tales, and went to his grave without once gazing upon the bird that made him famous.

Albatrosses live so far from usual human haunts that to encounter one you must step out—way out—of your comfort zone. To see one up close, on its nest, a long journey is required. These days, fortunately, it’s a bit easier than it was in the 1700s.

And so it was that I found myself on a ship bound for the Falkland Islands, just northeast of the southern tip of South America. I was working as a staff ornithologist on three consecutive round-trips to Antarctica, back and forth across the Drake Passage from Argentina, on a Finnish-built, Russian-operated research vessel converted for Canadian-organized expedition cruises. Because the Falklands are nearby and offer their own wildlife spectacles, they are often included on Antarctic itineraries.

The islands host one of the two largest albatross populations in the world (the other is at Midway Atoll, in the tropical Pacific). Close to a million black-browed albatrosses nest on the Falklands every year, mostly concentrated in just a couple of dense colonies. From a distance, these colonies resemble spilled salt and pepper on an austere but colorful landscape. There are
no native trees to the islands; the albatrosses pile their nests on top of bare rocks near cliff edges, typically surrounded by green slopes of chest-high tussock grass and impenetrable stands of yellow-flowering gorse. Sheep farmers own much of the land but fence off bird colonies to minimize disturbance and encourage visits from cruise ships, which are a prime source of local income. The weather is notoriously temperamental, even in summer, when frequent gales punctuate calm periods. Wind gusts can be powerful enough to blow people around like tumbleweeds, but the albatrosses fly straight into the teeth of such storms. It takes more than a hurricane to faze an albatross.

As our ship eased up to West Point Island, a 3.7-mile strip of rock and vegetation toward the west end of the archipelago, heavy weather was not in evidence. Instead, rare sunshine beamed across a stunning vista. Small groups of crisp black-and-white Magellanic penguins porpoised in the water while endemic Falkland steamer-ducks, bulky, flightless fowl named for their peculiar habit of windmilling to safety like paddleboats when panicked, loafed comfortably on a rocky beach. Inflatable Zodiac boats were craned off an upper deck to ferry everyone ashore for the hike to the albatross colony.

West Point has been settled by sheep farmers since the mid-1800s, and most of its surface is grazed flat. I followed a grassy Land Rover track that contoured gently toward the island’s opposite, exposed shoreline, serenaded by red-chested long-tailed meadowlarks while keeping an eye out for striated caracaras, raptorlike birds with a penchant for eating baby penguins and occasionally stealing people’s hats. After about a mile of easy walking, the track ended abruptly. I could see why: There wasn’t anywhere else to go.

The west side of the island dropped over a rampart of 1,100-foot-high sheer rock walls to a turbulent sea. Looking
down, I could see albatrosses gliding beneath me against the blue water; thousands of them were also overhead, on either side, and practically underfoot. Where the Land Rover track ended, the albatross colony began. Most of the birds nested on one densely packed slope too rocky for grass to grow, but some also occupied zones of fenced-off tussock. After pausing to take in the view, I stepped from the track and discovered two albatrosses mating on the other side of a thick clump of grass. Though a mere foot and a half away, they didn’t stop on my account; I stood there in amazement and watched them continue without a break for five full minutes, one balanced carefully on the other’s back. Up close, the albatrosses were huge—bodies like overstuffed pillows, heads the size of soda cans, webbed feet nearly as large as my hand with fingers at maximum spread. Their plumage, so starkly white-bodied and black-winged at a distance, was subtly beautiful at close range, with a quizzical black mark above the eye and brushed yellow and red tones on the beak. There was no real reason for them to be mating this late in the summer, as it was much too late to be fertilizing an egg. I wondered if they were doing it for fun, or practicing.

All around, albatrosses tended their nests. Most had small chicks, too young to be left alone, that peeped out from underneath their parents’ breasts. Some of the adults were feeding their young, curling their huge heads down to ground level and regurgitating a thick, calorie-rich stomach oil of concentrated seafood that the chicks eagerly gobbled. Already the race against starvation had begun. One adult albatross sat on a dried-out, wasted-away chick carcass. I wondered how long it would continue to brood its dead baby before giving up. If an albatross nest fails, the birds won’t try again for at least another year or two. It must be hard to let go.

The colony breathed life. Incoming albatrosses, with eight-foot wingspans (black-browed are one of the smallest albatrosses, much more compact than wanderers), maneuvered on the breeze to stall at just the right moment over their territory. Sometimes they misjudged and crash-landed, which made me a bit nervous about the birds swooping just a few inches above my head; the impact of a nine-pound albatross traveling 30 miles per hour could knock a person senseless. One knifed so close that I could feel the whoosh of air against my cheek, and I closed my eyes, enjoying the sensation of being so near to majesty.

Among the albatross nests, keg-shaped rockhopper penguins huddled in rocky crevices, showing off their rock-star hairdos and tuxedo body styling. I wondered what the albatrosses and penguins thought of each other, 70 million years after evolving from a common ancestor. Over those aeons, albatrosses grew long wings and became the greatest fliers in the world while penguins lost their ability to fly and became swimmers instead. They still seemed to share the same capacity for tenderness. Like the albatrosses, mated penguins like to stand close together, bodies touching, and I watched several pairs tenderly preening each other’s bristly feathers. Though penguins and albatrosses seem incomparably different, they maintain similar nesting routines, as do most large seabirds. It wasn’t hard to see a bit of us in their behavior, either. The birds reminded me of old couples, past the infatuation stage but locked in deep, enduring bonds.