Wings of the Albatross | National Geographic

at the end of an assignment like this albatross project i know as much as anybody about it and so i'm not just a photographer i become the storyteller and i become an ambassador for albatrosses it's a pleasure to be back here and this is a big night for the big birds you can't talk about albatrosses without talking about the legend so let's get that legend out of the way because it's really more about what we assume about the bird than what is real about the bird most people associate the albatross with something burdensome and awkward and of course it all goes back to coleridge's famous poem about the ancient mariner a sailor is punished because he kills an albatross and he has to wear the corpse around his neck coleridge never saw an albatross but he was inspired by the legends about this bird for centuries sailors had been wondering about them some of them assumed that they were the souls of drowned sailors others thought that they were the bringers of wind but nobody could explain why they flew like they did effortlessly cruising behind ships for days sometimes weeks on end without hardly flapping a wing we've come a long way since but what has not changed is that sense of all that virtually anyone feels when they come either eye with one of these amazing birds the american biologist robert cushman murphy once compared seeing his first great albatross at sea with lifetime experiences like seeing his first giant sequoia tree in california gazing down into the grand canyon he said expectation sank into nothingness albatrosses are birds of superlatives they fly like they're stunned pilots inhabiting their own bodies and they're made to exploit the wind they spend most of their long lives in the air and the data that scientists have accumulated in the last two decades are truly astonishing they've grown farther than any other creature on the planet one laysan albatross like this one traveled 15 000 miles in a month and at the end of a 50-year lifespan the average for most albatrosses an ordinary bird may have covered more than 3 million miles when it comes to frequent flyer miles they must be in a class by themselves but there's another dimension to these birds when they touch down on the remote specks of land where they reproduce they become different birds with intricate social lives that stand in great contrast to their solitary existence on the open oceans and then there's their lives at sea and those are still the least known of all even with all the advances in modern science and sensing technologies of the last two decades most of the knowledge we have about albatrosses is still circumstantial and indirect and an image like this one of a wandering albatross of new zealand is pretty rare and hard to get i was intrigued by the notion that these albatrosses after all have to live on the sea surface like any other seabird and i ended up experimenting with this perspective by deploying an underwater camera mounted on a pole and maneuvering it close to a bird some facts albatross is actually an aggregate you know there are 21 or 24 species of different kinds of albatrosses depending on who you talk to the taxonomy is still a source of discussion among scientists but they're all different and they range from elegant gray heads like this one breeding on the northern tip of south georgia to polar's albatrosses that really look out of place nesting on the three canopies in an island south of new zealand and even though albatrosses need wind they have managed to get along with the dole drums and found a way to establish a home base near the equator these are waved albatrosses courting on baron lava rock in the galapagos islands and courtship is another reason why people express superlatives when it comes to albatrosses when a wandering albatross male spreads these glorious wings in front of a female it is truly an amazing sight but she seems to express that it's no big deal i was there i guess at the right time this is where i camped the image was made on albatross island truly a hallowed place to me because this is where robert cushman murphy had made his original observations 80 years earlier in the beginning part of the 20th century and even though it looks pretty rough and i wasn't looking too happy i was elated to be there it was a true privilege and this is the yacht that took me around south georgia that memorable summer most albatrosses occur in the storm zone that girdles the earth in the southern hemisphere sailors know them as the roaring 40s the furious 50s some are down there can feel like winter here snow squall in a black brow colony makes these birds hunker down while they're incubating their eggs albatrosses need wind albatrosses and wind are inseparable they do not fly like any other bird instead of expending their own energy by flapping wings they tap the wind's energy in a superb and sophisticated manner they glide low above the ocean to take advantage of wind bouncing off waves and exploiting wind gradients as they change from right above the water to 60 feet above the surface and here to make it come alive is a short video clip by chris that show how they fly in endless undulations rising up into the wind and then using gravity to make forward progress this is a royal albatross and here's a smaller black proud albatross also off new zealand the principle is the same now if that clip made you seasick you're not the only one it's really hard to photograph albatross is in flight on the open ocean on sure it's a little easier things become a bit more predictable and i don't have to worry about my stomach too much this is a blackfoot albatross flying in light winds over french frigate shoals in the leeward islands of hawaii you can see the wings are fully stretched and even drooping at the wing tip like a b-52 they only break that streamline when they have to come in for a landing they stand up use their feet as brakes and they become ordinary birds unsure but in the air they're a symphony and the more extreme the wind conditions are the more albatrosses come into their own this is a royal albatross it measures nearly 11 feet from wingtip to wingtip they can bend themselves in two sickles slicing through the air at 50 miles an hour or more this image reminds me of a line in carl safina's text for the geographic an albatross he wrote is its own taught long bow and the breeze is its bowstring they've mastered the art of staying in motion without practically expending any energy metabolic studies have shown that an albatross in flight spends barely more energy than an albatross sitting on the ground doing absolutely nothing and when the force 10 gale of the falklands whipped the ocean's surface into froth these black brown albatrosses were actually able to make forward progress into that stormwind they're so comfortable in the air they're so much in control of their own lives that if it weren't for a need to breed they would never come back on sure but they do have to there is that urge young albatrosses once they fled spend four five six years before they come back and touch solid ground again but when they do when they come back that first summer they appear reluctant to come down from the air and young birds like these may cruise for hours on end gliding back and forth above the colony and i can imagine how intimidating it might be when you've been out there over the ocean as a solitary bird and you're confronted with a sea bird city where do you land it usually starts on the edges albatrosses have little fear for humans because they only come ashore on these remote islands but still if i want to get into their world i have to make myself small and wait until the birds forget i'm there and then when they go back to their own lives i can show them as individuals as partners and members of a collective courtship in albatrosis is a highly stylized ritual black brown male capes at a female they fence with their bills side by side they bow to one another a female can indicate her willingness by laying her head back to which a male can respond by twisting his neck upside down as he grooms his partner it all looks very intimate and serene but there's another dimension to this let me share with you this clip privacy is hard to find in the albatross colony this is a mixed breeding colony of gray heads and black brows on the northern tip of campbell island youngst youngsters first on their pedestals most of these islands are really remote and hard to get to here's a pile of our gear mixed with that of a bbc tv crew on carcass island at the western end of the falkland islands this is going ashore on steeple jason where we landed with special permission from the wildlife conservation society which after the island was bought by a philanthropist handed over the title to wcs and now the islands are protected for the first time in their history and we spent a memorable week assured at earth carl carrying gear sure but onwards to another part of the southern ocean campbell island 400 miles south of new zealand here's christine after he made a long and arduous hike to find albatrosses this is a really interesting species member of the albatross family it's hard to pick favorites but many of the specialists when you ask them they will admit to a weak spot for these light blemental city albatrosses which are cliff nesters they nest in solitary fashion instead of aggregating in large numbers here's a close-up of one of them and here's an image of a suede albatross in flight different kind of flight pattern different kind of outline but light metal albatrosses wasn't the only reason we were there we were there for the truly big birds but getting around wasn't the easiest things we are after all in the furious 50s this is a force 11 gale the weather forecast weren't that good but we had only one chance at crossing the islands so we did we were knocked over multiple times that's a hot-footed hike we took and that's carl commenting on the condition of his feet after an eight-hour hike across campbell island this is a little bivouac made to shelter two biologists but it ended up being home sweet home to the four of us you have to choose your companions carefully on these kind of trips carl on the left peter moore next to him and chris and myself there truly giants they're even a little bit bigger than the legendary wandering albatross 20 25 pounds 11 foot wingspan and are they glorious they made for life some royal albatrosses are known to have lived for 70 years so a pair men and bond forms can stay together for 50 years reproducing one chick every other year so it's important that you choose the right partner and that is one reason for this extended courtship that may span two years spending time together is important here's a little video clip of one of these intimate moments in the lives of two birds about to become partners but it doesn't always go right during our survey of royals on campbell we came upon this nest with an abandoned egg something must have gone wrong one partner didn't come back to the other one that was incubating an egg and after a while it could be several weeks because they're really faithful to one another and to that precious egg after several weeks when the other didn't show up that bird had to go save itself we don't know what happened but we do know that the natural mortality of paired royal albatrosses in their adult lives is extremely low maybe one to two percent per year so this could be one of these instances where mortality was induced by fishing practices and that of course is the edge of this story that i'm sharing with you tonight but let's talk about how it starts let's talk about how this pair bond begins after these birds spend years at sea they do come back to the place where they're born not just the island but even the neighborhoods where they grew up one bird on the ground soliciting the company of others and there they land and then they get together these are teenagers they try out moves on one another they know the moves by instinct but that is not enough they have to learn how to perform the right moves in the right sequence in front of other birds that are also not so sure about themselves so teenagers at them all these are called gams lose social affiliations that may last for half an hour and then the birds break up and they fly off again and then another aggregation may form an hour later in another place and so it goes and gradually they learn how to do it and gradually i learned how to do my job i know what they're going to do so my job is to be on the periphery and to be right behind them because i know sooner or later one of these royals will unfold those glorious wings and then i'm looking into their world from my perspective um uh uh now you may think this is humorous but it is serious business to these birds halfway around the world once again now we're in the northern hemisphere in the pacific ocean hundreds of thousands of arbitrages gather on the beaches of sub-tropical lands it's a very unusual place for an albatross to call home and yet there they are placed on albatrosses and black feet and here are the black feet albatrosses they prefer the open beach and their courtship has evolved in another direction it's more energetic and their moves are even more extravagant now as i mentioned earlier these birds know that courtship repertoire by instinct instinct is a term we use when we really don't know what these animals are doing it really is a way to cover up our own ignorance but those courtship moves don't mean anything until the birds internalize how to do it and perform the moves in the right sequence in front of the right partner and to do it with vigor as duke ellington once said it don't mean a thing until it has got that swing so the culminating moment in the courtship of these black feet is when both of them stand up on tiptoes and they do it in synchrony and they both lay their bills against each other that is when things may be getting seriously evolving towards a partnership no matter whether it's one species or the other ultimately courtship results in prospective partners spending time together at a nest site that a male has already claimed but then of course it's her choice whether he's the right guy and whether it's the right spot and then parenting leads to one chick born after an incubation that can take anywhere from one to more than two months and that chick is fed through regurgitated oil from an upper stomach albatrosses have two stomachs in the upper stomach they digest their food the oil floats to the surface fish and squid are rendered into oil water protein and fat and the oil is regurgitated into the mouths and into the stomachs of these chicks and a happy albatross chick is a chick with a lot of oil in its belly they don't get fed too often initially maybe every couple of days and then later on the intervals may lengthen to one to two weeks if you're a black proud albatross chick you may be born on top of a mud pedestal up to three feet tall truly amazing structures that parents keep adding on to year after year and it's extraordinary to contemplate that these birds which fly across ocean basins and make their way without trouble back to that nest site will not recognize their own egg if it falls out of that mud pedestal their own nest it just becomes an object that means nothing to them but when it's inside that nest scrape it's an object to be cherished they incubate it and then when a chick begins to pip at the surface of the shell it begins to call out and the parent begins to respond the bond between parent and chick is established before that chick is even emerging chicks like this one a lay sand crawling out of the egg on turn island in the french figured shoals were born in january february and they're dependent on their parents for up to half a year first couple of weeks parents alternate prudent because there are predators aerial predators to contend with here on campbell island a gray head is warding off a scuba flying overhead here's another scua think of them as gulls on steroids hook peaks clawed feet and this one was thinking nothing of assaulting a fully ground wandering albatross that was blundering into its territory other enemies crested caracaras also known as johnny rooks in the falkland islands patrolling the edges of a huge albatross colony on both shane at the southern edge of falklands and here's a group of karakaras tearing apart a hapless albatross juvenile so defense comes from being big and being tall and being able to escort that oil back to anyone who dares to come close so i stay upwind taking a closer look truly endearing at this stage a fuzzy chick this one is maybe a month old but underneath a real bird is growing but it takes a while it takes months of shuttling in food from the far reaches of an ocean basin to make an albatross chick grow into a real bird and then towards the end there's some humorous moments in a matter of a few weeks every hairstyle that's been tried out in human society is sported on top of would-be albatrosses from baroque to rockabilly from punk to crew cut but no matter which fashion you adopt when you're a liaison albatross you have to head to the beach that's where they all gather in the early summer and that's what i begin to try out how to get into the air it's astonishing again to contemplate that these amazing effortless flyers have to learn how to fly their parents aren't there to teach them they have to figure it out for themselves and they have no clue about it other than this urge how to run down the beach and get into the air but coordination between feet and wings is not always the best thing but they keep trying they have so much energy and they have to in a matter of a few weeks learn how to do it or they die the naivete that is birds standing there on the shoreline gathering by the thousands by the tens of thousands there are over a million albatrosses in the leeward islands of hawaii and every summer it's a trial by fire for these lay sands and these blackfeet albatrosses the year when we were there midway at all last summer the winds were light and many of these birds ended up paddling out onto the lagoon and that is where they were readying themselves for that final flight that would take them out of the sheltered waters into the open blue ocean here's one bird interesting to note that just before the parents leave them they pump a last meal into their stomachs these birds have a little bit of a fat reserve but it also makes them a little bit heavier than they ideally need to be in order to take flight so here's that video clip the interior of midway at all and thousands of young birds and here's one heading to the beach seeing the ocean for the first time not so certain about things not so good on its feet yet but he's not the only one but not everybody makes it there's heavy mortality in the middle of summer many birds get into the water before they're ready to go they haven't learned how to waterproof themselves yet preening using that oil gland at the base of their tail and they get waterlogged some of them take by are taken by sharks many of them sink and not seen again some of them are able to make it back to the beach the lucky ones may get a second chance but for many there is no recourse it's truly heart-wrenching to watch but there's nothing you can do it's all part of nature and in seabird colony you see everything turn island in that chain of islands that stretches from kauai halfway towards japan turn island is a speck of land that is where we went along with two researchers from the university of california at santa cruz truly heaven on earth if you want to study albatrosses low-tech tools little plastic bucket in which she weighs chicks but it's high-tech science this is an instrument that has revolutionized our understanding of albatrosses it's a sensor that can plot where the birds are can accumulate other data oceanographic data and beam the information up to a satellite overhead signal is beamed down to a server in france researchers can log on to it and almost in real time they can see what the birds are doing what they're up to this is scott one of the people with whom we worked here he is applying one of these transmitters gluing it onto the back of an albatross the package weighs only a few grams and it really doesn't bother the birds at all this is an image made using my laptop set up on the beach in front of a nesting albatross and this is the pathway of a single albatross starting and ending up back on turn island these birds are amazing but they are also becoming biological sensors for us because we can follow them through these amazing instruments and they gather data for us not just about what they're doing but about is happening on the open ocean midway of course was a theater of war during world war ii things have calmed down on the ground the islands are protected but on the open ocean in the central pacific it's still an area of conflict between albatrosses and us this is just one small pile of junk that the u.s fish and wildlife service had to collect from midway legume this is just a minute part of the central pacific there's a lot of stuff out there there's a gyre in the central pacific where stuff accumulates all this junk plastic objects rubber objects that float on the surface of the ocean some of the objects i collected on midway and put out in front of an incubating albatross toothbrushes cigarette lighters gi joes you name it they find it and because it tastes just like squid they swallow it take it back to their chicks which die by the thousands from indigestion you see the corpses with plastic and rubber inside this young one was lucky because the parent regurgitated that bottle cap on the ground instead of into a child into a chick stomach of course the problem's not confined to the central pacific here's a long roll of plastic that had been regurgitated by a wandering albatross on south georgia if it had ended up in a bird's stomach where it would have unfolded of course it would have caused mortality we do know what is happening out there there are enough observers on sea of fairing fishing boats accumulating data that we know where the fishing belts go and what they're doing and we also know where the albatrosses go and it's no surprise that they both end up going to the same areas where fish and squid are abundant the albatrosses accumulate behind these fishing boats because the fishing is easy there they grab onto the bait that is extended out from these fishing vessels in the case of a long liner it can be 80 miles of baited hooks and because the wandering albatrosses are the biggest and the brassiest of them all they end up near the baited hooks they out compete the others and that's probably one reason why they suffer disproportionately from this problem they drown nigel is an australian seabird biologist who first started studying the problem of the seabird bycatch in the late 1980s and here he is on a fishing boat off hawaii talking with fishermen which have adopted another one of these easy solutions instead of running out the bait from the stern of a boat running it out from the site and again you can see these very simple devices that are dangling there that have reduced the mortality by more than 90 percent on lamb the birds are pretty safe now most of the significant colonies have protected status this is one of these extraordinary places in the falkland islands an island called beauchain just south of the main falkland islands where i had the great privilege to camp for a week wall to wall birds his colony extends for two and a half miles but it's out at sea that the problems now occur and ironically it's the bird of legend the wandering albatross that seems to be at the highest risk right now when i first went to south georgia in the late 1980s more than a thousand breeding pairs of this amazing snowy white race occurred there that population has plummeted there are fewer than half of them now and the effects if you extend that line there's only one endpoint and that is extinction but it doesn't have to happen melville once wrote in the course of moby dick when he was trying to articulate the majesty of albatrosses he wrote is it conceivable that such an utterly majestic creature is utterly unknown to man or sure that was them we have no excuse anymore not to know about these birds and not to care about them beyond the science beyond the conservation a personal note what these birds mean to me my mission is to bring animals to people and to show them as dignified beings who may be very different from ourselves but they lead parallel lives and there are resemblances as i hope i've shared with you this evening these amazing achievements these birds as individuals and their partnerships lifelong bonds but even beyond that personal notes and this is the last comment i would like to make these birds mean more than just inspiring all in this individually they are ambassadors for complete ecosystems they are vital signs but wild places that you will never know but as long as they're there because they're flying numbers something must be right you

Channel: National Geographic

Views: 475,799

Keywords: National Geographic Live, Frans Lanting, Albatross, photography, nature, birds, National Geographic, speaker, interview, behind the scenesnational geographic, nat geo, natgeo, animals, wildlife, science, explore, discover, survival, documentary

Id: toJwBgjCZMI

Length: 39min 29sec (2369 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 08 2011