4 | Chapter 1
birds to cover immense distances and to provide cheer for lonely sailors
a thousand miles from land. Despite their ability to bring joy in the
midst of emptiness, albatrosses have not always been treated kindly. Lit-
tle heeding the fate of the Ancient Mariner, nineteenth- century emi-
grants bound for Australia regularly tormented and killed albatrosses as
they traversed the Southern Ocean, as immortalized in Charles Baude-
laire’s L’Albatros. Sailors used the webs of the albatrosses’ feet to make
tobacco pouches and the wing bones to make pipes. Yet whatever the
circumstances of the encounter, the seafarer surely wondered. Where do
these albatrosses nest? How do they return home against the unrelent-
ing wind if their outward journey had taken them far downwind? Or do
they follow the tactic of the tea clippers and circle the globe, forever
chased by the west wind?
North of the albatrosses’ home of grey- green productive waters,
churned by the wind, lies the blue zone of the subtropics. Look down
into the limpid water from a small yacht and fancy that the water is so
clear as to allow a peep into the miles-down deep. Yet the water is clear
for a reason. It contains few nutrients, such as nitrates, and consequently
there is little planktonic growth to cloud the water. Creatures higher up
the food chain are correspondingly scarce, and so a day at sea can be
overwhelmingly boring for a birdwatcher. A single petrel, the size of a
small gull, arcs over the horizon, but the view is too brief to permit
discrimination among several rather similar species. And that’s it for
another day. Even here in the midst of emptiness, the ornithologist won-
ders: can that lone petrel make a living in these barren waters, the blue
water desert, or is it using its power of economical flight to at least seek
out regions where the seas are more productive and its prey, small squid,
more easily found?
***
Perhaps the next logical step in this tale would be to recount how far the
traditional observer has taken this story. I am thinking of the seawatcher
peering into the storm from a headland or the researcher, stuck un-
washed on an island, who unravels the breeding habits of a seabird
species with the help of binoculars, notebook and a healthy dollop of