Ahead, the mist thinned to reveal a fang of rock rearing feet out of the sea: the Pyramid, the sole breeding site of the Chatham albatross. Around its shrouded summit the regal birds wheeled by the hundreds, their plangent wails and strange kazoo-like cackles echoing off the black volcanic slopes. The Mahalia 's skipper lowered an inflatable dinghy and ran me ashore. Fur seals roused themselves to watch our approach, then, taking fright, tobogganed into the sea.
The skipper positioned the craft against a barnacled rock face—no mean feat in the six-foot swells—and I jumped, gripping rubbery stalks of bull kelp and pulling myself up to a jumble of boulders.
Sidestepping the fetid pools where seals had been lying, I scrambled up to the only level part of the island, an area about the size of a tennis court, where Paul Scofield, an ornithologist and expert on the Chatham albatross, and his assistant Filipe Moniz had pitched tents, anchoring them with three-inch-long fishhooks wedged into crevices in the rock.
A few feet away a partly fledged Chatham albatross chick stood up on its pedestal nest, yawned and shook its shaggy wings.
Then it flumped down with the stoical look one might expect from a creature that had sat on a nest for three months and had another month or two to go. Around the Pyramid colony adult albatrosses were landing with a whoosh, bringing meals of slurrified seafood to their perpetually hungry offspring. When one alighted near the tents, Scofield and Moniz each picked up a shepherd's crook and crept toward it. The bird tried to take off, its wings stretching some six feet as it ran from Moniz.
A swipe with the crook, a bleat of protest, and the albatross was apprehended, snagged by the neck. Moniz cradled the bird, keeping a tight grip on its devilishly hooked bill, while Scofield taped a popsicle-size GPS logger—a tracking device—between its shoulders, spray-painted its snowy chest with a slash of blue for ease of recognition, and released it.
He and Moniz were planning to stay three weeks on the Pyramid, and they hoped to deploy the devices on a dozen breeding adults to track their movements at sea. Scofield, of New Zealand's Canterbury Museum and co-author of Albatrosses, Petrels and Shearwaters of the World , has been studying albatrosses for more than 20 years. To research these birds is to commit oneself to months at a time on the isolated, storm-lashed but utterly spectacular specks of land on which they breed: from the Crozet Islands in the Indian Ocean, to South Georgia in the South Atlantic, to Campbell Island and the Snares Islands in New Zealand.
Scofield has visited most of them. Studying albatrosses is also not without risks. Jury-rigged, the yacht limped to its destination. Scofield and the crew stayed on Marion with other albatross researchers for five months they had planned on only two days while waiting for a ship to pick them up. Another time, during a ferocious storm in the Chathams, Scofield and his colleagues had to wear safety harnesses bolted to the rock as they slept in their tents, in case a wave washed over their campsite.
Albatross eggs and even adult birds were bowled off their nests by the wind, and Scofield observed more than one parent try to push an egg back onto the nest with its bill—a challenge analogous to rolling a football up a flight of steps with your nose. Scofield and other albatross researchers return year after year to their field studies knowing that albatrosses are one of the most threatened families of birds on earth. All but 2 of the 21 albatross species recognized by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature are described as vulnerable, endangered or, in the case of the Amsterdam and Chatham albatrosses, critically endangered.
The scientists hope that the data they gather may save some species from extinction. Albatrosses are among the largest seabirds. The "great albatrosses," the wandering and royal albatrosses, have the widest wingspans—ten feet or more—of any living bird. These are the birds of legend: the souls of drowned sailors, the harbinger of fair breezes and the metaphor for penance in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner: "Ah!
A wandering albatross is a "regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness," wrote Herman Melville. They look white in flight, but even the wanderers have a few darker feathers on their wings, and many of the smaller species have varying combinations of black, white, brown and gray plumage. Albatrosses are masters of soaring flight, able to glide over vast tracts of ocean without flapping their wings.
So fully have they adapted to their oceanic existence that they spend the first six or more years of their long lives which last upwards of 50 years without ever touching land. Everything about albatrosses underscores the difficulty of eking out an existence in their environment.
Unlike penguins, which can hunt for extended periods underwater and dive to great depths, albatrosses can plunge into only the top few feet of the ocean, for squid and fish. The lengthy albatross "chickhood" is an adaptation to a patchy food supply: a slow-maturing chick needs food less often than a fast-maturing one.
Similarly, the prolonged adolescence—around 12 years in wandering albatrosses—is an extended education during which birds prospect the oceans, learning where and when to find food. The chick's nutritional needs cannot be met by a single parent. Mate selection, therefore, is a critical decision, and is all about choosing a partner that can bring home the squid. Jean-Claude Stahl of the Museum of New Zealand has studied courtship and pairing in southern Buller's albatrosses, which breed on the Snares Islands—a naturalist's El Dorado where penguins patter along forest paths, sea lions sleep in shady glades and myriad shearwaters blacken the evening sky.
In Buller's albatrosses the search for a partner takes several years. It begins when adolescent birds are in their second year ashore, at about age 8. They spend time with potential mates in groups known as gams, the albatross equivalent of singles bars. In their third year ashore, males stake a claim to a nest site and females shop around, inspecting the various territory-holding males. Such data has revealed, among other things, how the birds are able to efficiently soar over the ocean for such long periods of time.
Another big unknown is what happens to an albatross chick once it flies the nest, Suryan says. Does it come back to the same colony as its parents, for instance? As an international sensation, Wisdom is also the perfect candidate for her own webcam. Alas, Plissner says the internet at Midway is horribly slow. The next best thing would be a motion-activated camera that can be programmed to take a still picture or a short video every 15 minutes or so. All rights reserved. Share Tweet Email.
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Eighty or 90 years have been recorded of cockatoos in captivity. This article is more than 8 months old. Wisdom incubating a previous egg. The Laysan albatross is thought to have hatched more than 35 chicks in her life. At 70 years of age, Wisdom the Laysan albatross has hatched another chick.
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