The Ancient Mariner

by Nancy Baron

Originally published in The Georgia Strait, 1999.

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Southern tip of Haida Gwaii, BC

May 10, 1999

Storm warning. Our 68-foot ketch rises elevator-like on a two-storey swell, then falls into the hole it leaves. Leaning over the sailboat's bucking bow is American marine biologist Carl Safina. He barely seems to notice the wild ride, so intently is he staring at the heaving horizon. Safina is searching for birds whose seafaring lifestyle means that you practically have to be an ancient mariner to see them: black-footed albatrosses.

Aimed at the mid-Pacific, we enter albatross territory. Everyone on this natural history expedition is gamely gazing out to sea. But as we head farther, the seas continue to build. People turn green. "Do you want to go back?," I ask them. "No," they answer resolutely, thrilled by the chase, by the idea of albatross. Part scientist, part poet Safina eggs us on, "An albatross is a wondrous metaphor-- a solo trekker finding its own way across the trackless ocean, amidst a sea of uncertainties." On wings spanning two meters, these giant seabirds ride storms that would overwhelm most other living things.

While some scientists have long suspected that albatrosses travel vast distances, only recently have they discovered the astonishing details. Safina has just come from the birds' breeding grounds in the Hawaiian Islands where he was with albatross researcher Dave Anderson from Wake Forest University, North Carolina. Wanting to know where albatrosses actually go, Andersen harnessed thumb-sized radio transmitters to the birds' backs, and tracked their movements by satellite. He could barely believe what the signals showed.

In a round trip that can take up to three weeks, breeding black-footed albatrosses shuttle back and forth between their nest sites on Midway Atoll and Tern Island in the mid Pacific and our west coast waters. Anderson tracked one albatross that flew 40,000 kilometres in 90 days back and forth to the continental shelf. Gliding at 30 knots, three times the speed of a fast sailboat, they slice across the remote expanses of the ocean to feed at the shelf's productive edge. Here, winds and upwelling currents churn up nutrients, kickstarting an explosion of plankton, which feeds a plethora of krill, small fishes, and squid. The parents load up at the shelf, and then head home to their single chick. "Quite a way to go for take-out," says Safina.

Designed for big winds, albatrosses cover almost super-natural distances simply by holding their long thin wings outstretched. Pointing downward, gravity propels them building momentum like a descending roller coaster. Then as they near the water's surface they tilt their wings to glide upwards, tacking across the wind, their wingtips elegantly grazing mountainous waves, like the ones we are inelegantly pounding through on our ship, the Island Roamer.

Just 72 hours earlier I had emailed Safina on Long Island where he lives, and told him I was leading a twelve-day natural history ecotour expedition to Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlottes). This archipelago perches on the lip of the continental shelf, making it one of the best launching places to witness black-footed albatross. Having spent much of October through May in the Hawaiian Islands observing the albatross on their breeding colonies, he leapt at the chance to see the birds feeding at the continent's edge.

Safina, 44, is one of the world's most widely recognized voices on ocean issues. First as a boy, then as a research scientist he was simply absorbed with learning about the sea, but as he saw the things he loved disappearing, he felt forced to start fighting back. "Although, from our superficial view, the oceans may look the same as they always have," he says, "they have changed and changed greatly." Already Safina has played a big role in changing American and international fisheries policies, pushing through new laws to help end over-fishing. A vice-president of Audubon, he founded the Living Ocean's program, which at the policy level is forcing recalcitrant fishery management councils through litigation, to do what the new laws mandate. At the same time, he is trying to create a new sea ethic. Safina the poet wrote a love song to the sea, marrying hard science and romantic vision in his highly acclaimed book, "Song for the Blue Ocean." Now he has turned his attention to writing a book about albatrosses because, in their travels, albatross traverse so many of the issues--overfishing, marine debris, toxins, even the way that the oceans are changing with global warming. "Besides," says Safina, "I think albatrosses are knock-outs."

That's why he's here, leaning precariously overboard, eyes straining to spot this bird of myth and mystery. But Cape St. James is living up to its reputation as the windiest area in North America, and the marine forecasts have etched a wave in the brow of our captain Chris Tulloch.

There's a run for buckets. Still no one asks me to turn round. I look at Chris. He grimaces ruefully. I nod reluctantly. We turn tail and run before the approaching storm, fleeing up Houston Stewart Channel away from the exposed west coast. I am feeling bad for Carl because in these protected waters we've lost all hope of seeing black-foots. But suddenly he hollers, "Albatross!"

We're not the only boat that has sought protection. A halibut longliner is fishing the east side of the Charlottes and swirling around it is a dark swarm of seabirds--storm petrels, shearwaters, fulmars and three goliath birds amongst their smaller brethren wheeling in air-slashing circles.

With a body about the size of a Canada goose, wings three times as long and only a third as wide, these are impressive seabirds. To wear one around your neck would be burdensome indeed. Elegantly adapted to life at sea, salt glands near the base of their bills enable them to drink saltwater. But even more radical is the navigational role that albatrosses' noses play. Work by researcher Gabrielle Nevitt at the University of Davis, California, suggests that contrary to the common belief that all birds have a poor sense of smell, albatrosses sniff their way across the seas. They seem able to sense "peaks and valleys of scent that make up an olfactory landscape overlying the sea's surface," possibly by detecting an odorous gas (dimethyl sulfide) that is produced by plankton. Where there is concentrated plant plankton, there is a profusion of life-- animal plankton, crustaceans, fishes, and squid. Albatrosses' sense of smell helps them hone in on patches of productivity in the vast oceans. Olfactory clues may not only lead albatross to food-rich areas at the continent's margins but probably, along with a variety of navigational aids including magnetic-fields and celestial navigation, helps them find their way back home.

Smell also attracts the albatrosses to fishing boats where they go after the bait on long-lines. Which is why we are seeing them here. Hoping for handouts, albatross follow long-liners places they wouldn't otherwise go. They feed by seizing squid and fish off the surface of the water with their long, hooked bill. And you get the impression that they don't let go very often. Many albatrosses, however, are killed each year when they dive after bait, become hooked, and are dragged downwards on the weighted lines. This is a serious concern for the black-footed albatrosses. Their entire population only numbers about 200,000 and their rate of reproduction is slow. They don't even begin breeding until the age of eight or nine, then they don't necessarily breed every year and when they do, they raise a single chick --if they are lucky. Scientists are worried that more black-footed albatrosses may be dying than are being born each year, whittling away an already small world population.

*****

Safina and others are working on make the seas "sea-bird safe" by securing fisheries regulations and incentives to eliminate seabird bykill. In 1993, the stunning numbers of seabirds killed by high-seas drift netting contributed to the worldwide ban of this fishing method. Today, long-line fisheries pose the biggest problem. The Alaskan longline fishery alone accounts for the death of 14,000 birds annually, of which approximately 640 are Black-footed Albatrosses. But at least the Alaskans are monitoring and working on solutions. The problem of snagging birds is technologically fixable by a variety of techniques, such as streamers that scare the birds off or setting the lines at night, or dying the baits blue to camouflage them.

In fact our American neighbours have had programs to evaluate and reduce seabird bycatch for several years but as yet, BC is the black hole of data between Washington state and Alaska. Last May in Honolulu, researchers from all over got together to work on conservation of black-footed albatrosses, a workshop that will be followed up again this May. Last year, nobody attended from British Columbia.

"Very little has been done in BC, " say Ken Morgan, the Canadian Wildlife Service biologist who is trying to get things rolling with monitoring of seabird bycatch in BC.

Why not?

"As long as you don't look, you don't have to acknowledge there's a problem," he explains. " Because there is a lack of information concerning the bycatch of seabirds for our west coast there generally is the assumption that there isn't a bycatch problem and consequently there are no rules or guidelines to get fishers to use deterrents."

Canada has signed FAO's International Plan of Action that states that all signatory countries will come up with a national plan of action to reduce bykill, including seabirds by 2001. But there's no teeth behind it. The only pressure is embarrassment for not having followed through.

"CWS is trying to push FOC (Fisheries and Oceans) to try to get off the mark, but I guess it’s a low priority for them," says Morgan. "They've got lots of other problems." (In BC, approximately 90% of DFO's budget goes to salmon, leaving little for everything else.) "In their view of the world, the bycatch problem pales by comparison. But that doesn't mean we're not responsible. I would like the long-lining industry and DFO, which is regulating the industry, to be aware that all indications are that there is a problem. I don't want to be alarmist, but my gut feeling is we're part of the problem, maybe not the major part, but all the small pieces add up to a big problem."

*****

Over the last hundred and fifty years humans, not storms, have propelled albatrosses on a wild ride. Three species soar the waters of the temperate North Pacific. In decreasing numbers of abundance they are Laysan, black-footed and the short-tailed albatrosses.

The Black-footed Albatrosses, the most common albatrosses of our coast, breed on Midway Atoll and Laysan Island. And Midway, as its name suggests, lies exactly halfway between North America and Japan. At 487 km northwest of Honolulu, it is at the sinking end of the Hawaiian chain.

To track the history of Midway Atoll, is to chart the fortunes of black-footed albatrosses. Until the end of the 19th Century, Midway belonged to the birds who seek out the most remote, predator free places to raise their young. But in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, albatross feathers became the preferred style of the French millinery trade. So Japanese feather hunters landed on the birds' breeding islands and slaughtered them to sell their feathers for high fashion French hats. Short-tailed albatrosses, which nested on islands closest to Japan, were hardest hit. Historians estimate that more than five million were killed by collectors.

In fact, they were believed extinct in the 1940's. But at the time their last colonies were decimated, a few adolescent birds were still at sea. These survivors eventually returned to the silent sites of their birth, found each other and bred. Since then, short-tailed albatrosses have crept back from the brink and now number about 1,000. But bones from middens -- the organic garbage dumps of native peoples -- show that at one time, short-tailed albatrosses were abundant and a fairly common item on the menus of west coast peoples.

The slaughter of albatrosses by feather collectors was finally stopped by Teddy Roosevelt, the American's conservation-minded president. In 1903, visitors to Midway Atoll reported thousands of black-foots and Laysan albatrosses bodies lacking tails and wings strewn about. Roosevelt was outraged and put the navy in charge of keeping a lookout. In 1905 a party of poachers were arrested on nearby Lisiansky Island where they had killed over 300,000 albatrosses -- more than the entire world population of blackfooteds that exists today.

Between 1920 and 1940 the birds had a reprieve and their numbers steadily grew again. But in 1935, Midway Atoll became a stopping point for the Clippers, the first trans Pacific flights. Next it became a critical air and navy base during the Second World War. To defend Hawaii from the increasing possibility of hostilities with Japan, construction of the Midway Naval Air Station began in 1940. The Japanese first bombed Midway, on December of 1941, the same day as Pearl Harbor. Convinced that Midway must be taken as a stepping stone to Hawaii, they attacked again on June 4, 1942. But the US headed off the invasion by breaking the Japanese' secret code and sending a fake message which helped turn the tables. Although outnumbered four to one, the US fleet ambushed the incoming Japanese and with the long eye of history, this battle has been widely heralded as the turning point of World War II.

More than 300 Americans, 3,500 Japanese, and unknown numbers of albatross died in the battle of Midway. Following the war the naval air base was rebuilt and the albatross began to recover, but airplanes and albatrosses are not a match made in heaven. Grainy newsreels of "The Goony Birds of Midway" show phalanxes of soldiers jogging down the runway waving white sheets trying to keep the site-faithful birds away. They tried firing guns into the air, then smoke bombs, and finally flame throwers. But nothing can deter determined albatrosses. In ultimate frustration the navy brought in bulldozers and buried 62,000 nesting birds alive. Then in an attempt to keep the numbers down, the navy paved half the island: birds don't like asphalt because it becomes too hot.

But in 1988 the birds scored again when the atoll became a National Wildlife Refuge and soon after the Department of Defense closed down the Midway Naval Air Facility. In 1996, control of Midway transferred to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, who in partnership with a private business called Midway Phoenix have made the island a centre of research and have opened it to limited ecotourism. Now up to 100 visitors a week are permitted to visit and witness the spectacle of an albatross breeding colony, as well as 14 other nesting species of seabirds, rare marine wildlife such as monk seals, sea turtles, and spinner dolphins, and superb fishes and underwater marine life.

Midway's history of loss and redemption has an eerie resonance with the theme in the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," the epic poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Having taken the life of an innocent albatross following his ship, the mariner and his crew are becalmed. Facing death and suffering without food or water, his crew hangs the dead albatross around the mariner's neck as a burden of penitence. Not until the mariner realizes and accepts the beauty and sacredness of "all things great and small" is he reborn into a reverence of life and saved. His relevation gives him a second chance.

*****

Mid Pacific to Midway Atoll

June 17, 1999

The idea of foraying across the Pacific myself, following the albatrosses home to Midway Atoll took hold. I imagined watching the very birds I'd seen in Haida Gwaii, feeding their young "BC grown" oceanic groceries.

Peering out the window of the Boeing 767 at the blue bowl of the Pacific the light clings to strands of cloud brushed across the skies. "Mares tails and mackerel scales make tall ships carry small sails," I recite to myself. Hmm, must be windy. Good for homing albatross. I envision a long, thin bill slicing the air, gleaming eyes squinted against the wind, dense feathers riffling like fur, and long, light-boned glider wings stiff as sails, blasting the bird northwest to a wafer of sand in the mid Pacific where I too am headed.

After the six-hour flight, I stumble off the plane in Honolulu. As I emerge from customs, a darkly tanned Safina greets me with a lei of purple orchids. He has just spent two weeks watching albatross on Tern Island, another seabird island in the Hawaiian chain, the centre of the satellite tagging work being done by Dave Anderson. This will be his first trip to Midway as well.

In response to the swinging pendulum of history, flights to Midway Atoll must now work around the albatrosses’ schedules. From late October through May when the breeding birds are concentrated on the island, the twice weekly, two-hour flights from Honolulu arrive after dark to try to avoid collisions. But by June, air traffic lightens because the chicks can't yet fly and the parents are at sea on their long distance shuttles. There are only about 15 or 20 bird strikes a year, not bad considering that this is the world’s largest colony of Laysan and second largest of Black-footed albatrosses.

From the air, Midway Atoll is the classic tropical paradise consisting of an encircling coral reef and three white islets. The largest, Sand Island, which houses the airport, offices and accommodations, is only 1.6 by 3 kilometres in size. Tiny Eastern and Split Islands belong entirely to wildlife.

Hurrying off the plane we immediately head out to explore. "It's like a poultry farm!" exclaims Safina. The island is wall-to-wall albatrosses, but there are many others too. Elegant fairy terns, also known as white terns, festoon ledges and trees, red-tailed tropic birds are tucked between the roots of ironwood trees, two-toned sooty terns beat the air, and as evening thickens, petrels and shearwaters waft in like bats from the sea.

Vestiges of Midway's history are still apparent. The guest accommodations are two refurbished army barracks divided into rooms. Narrow streets are a reminder of days when the presence of people competed with birds. We sit down at the corner of Kramer Road and Halsey Drive. Dark mounds cover the grassy area between the army barracks. The mounds stir and long thin wings extend outwards. Albatross chicks. Now five months old, the gawky chicks lounge like couch potatoes, saving their energy for growing. Resembling Sesame Street's big bird, their heads are covered in long plumes that riffle in the breeze. Some have frosted tips, other are solid brunettes. A pale bare face is lit by dark almond eyes and a four inch hooked bill. With their adolescent down falling out in patches, they have the most absurd looking "doos", which, along with their awkwardness on land, led them to being called gooney birds. Still to me they seem somehow contained and distinguished. As we walk amongst the albatross, which is unavoidable, the chicks lurch to their feet and clap their bills. Safina calls it a standing ovation. As you pass it subsides. They sink to the ground again and resume dozing.

Albatross chicks rarely budge from their nest site, no matter what. This ensures that when a parent finally returns from its two to three week trip to the continental shelf, it can find them again. Chicks in the sun "chill out" by sitting back on their heels wafting their large webbed feet in the air to cool off. The other way the birds fight dehydration is through the food they receive. The package that the parents eventually deliver is so concentrated that it is almost like a plutonium battery of energy. A single feeding can increase the chick's weight by an unbelievable 40% and as this fat breaks down it metabolizes into much needed water. But sometimes the parents don't return in time.

A Filipino man wearing coveralls and a floppy orange hibiscus print hat rides a grass cutting sized tractor past where we sit. Weaving amongst the chick mounds, he pulls a small trailer. Periodically he stops and gets off his tractor with a pitchfork. He picks up a dead chick and throws it in the back trailer. "How many chicks die each day," I ask him. "Too many," he says. "At this time of year, this island, 300 to 350 a night. No good." Then he mounts his mechanical steed and continues on his rounds for the dead

*****

On Midway Atoll Life starts below the surface of the island and layers upward. One night a researcher shows us that if you get down on your hands and knees and moan at the earth, nesting shearwaters moan back from their honey-comb of burrows, like voices from purgatory. Albatross pave the surface, while napauca shrubs, bonzaied to umbrella shapes by wind are studded with the stick nests of frigate birds and red-footed boobies nesting precisely one-bill lunge apart. Tucked underneath the shrubs are Christmas shearwaters and red-tailed tropicbirds.

In their quest for a spot for their single egg, fairy terns have become the ultimate opportunists. They will deposit an egg on any surface, including a bicycle seat left unattended. As I sit watching Midway’s throb of life, a fairy tern hovers inches from my face, examining me and commenting in a gravely little voice. Whiter than white I can see the perfect outline of its feathers against a sapphire sky. The bird is only a little larger than a swallow with pointy wings, a forked tail and an indigo blue bill. Its eyes are glistening black diamonds. These white terns are so small and otherworldly; I imagine them as the souls of infants.

A big, burly sports fishing captain tenderly shows us "Tinkerbell." Tink", a fairy tern, was dropped as an egg on the back of a wooden bench outside his house, like someone depositing a small easter egg they couldn’t be bothered to hide. There her parents incubated her, and since she hatched, the bench has been her universe. She paces the back of the bench, clinging to it with clawed feet and waits for her parents to bring her in a gift from the sea. Eventually one arrives with a three-inch squid and Tink, who is not much larger, horks it down, no problem.

Life is crammed here into every niche. And for some rare creatures it is an enclave. Endangered Hawaiian monk seals hauled out on the white sand beaches, snooze undisturbed in the sun. Giant green sea turtles paddle the perimeter. The life in Midway's surrounding seas is yet another world, that the young albatrosses are on the verge of exploring.

*****

Each day the chicks are more vigorous, more focused seaward. Once an albatross chick fledges and leaves the nest, it may have nothing but the wild Pacific below as it wanders the sea, never pressing a solid surface, never setting a webbed foot ashore for seven years. When it finally reaches maturity and is driven to return to land to breed, it is absolutely faithful to its nest site. This is the place where, as a young bird, it courts and sparks another young albatross of the same year that will become its lifelong mate, a life that, if the birds are lucky, extends somewhere between 43 and 70 years. Where the birds meet and dance is emblazoned forever on the birds' memory and although the pair will go their separate ways after the breeding season, in late October, after months of sailing the seas, they find each other again by always returning to the exact same spot, amid the crowds.

Today it's windy and these adolescents react with excitement. Large numbers of chicks line up together on the beach for an exercise session, flapping their wings, and "trampolining" -lifting and lowering their feet. A more advanced chick is bouncing up and down, hovering a few seconds then dropping again. A big gust lifts it and flips it over. The bird picks itself up, preens for a minute, and then looks around as if to say, "Hope nobody saw that." He hops into the air again and this time lands on his beak. The harder the wind blows, the bigger the gusts, the greater the calamity. Though Carl and I laugh at this performance, in fact, this learning period is a dangerous time. As many as 10% of the birds born each year on Midway do not survive flight training. In addition to crash landings the birds may land on the water before they have completely waterproofed their feathers with oil and become sodden and drown.

A fledgling with a "doo" like Elvis, wanders towards the waters edge, muttonchops fluttering in the breeze. Ankle deep he stands in the water, contemplating this transition from land to sea. Another with a lion’s ruff, walks to the end of an old pier flaps his wings, pauses and peers over the edge, then jumps, dropping about 3 meters. He hits the water with a splash and starts paddling. Just then Carl yells, "Oh man, shark!"

Tiger sharks concentrate around the fledging beaches at this time of year for unsuspecting snacks. Albatross chicks are oblivious to the danger. The four-meter tiger shark approaches, a dark sinister line in the aquamarine water. The excited shark comes in fast. This is one of the first chicks of the year, and the shark is out of practice. His own bow wave lifts and displaces the chick to the side. The pillow of water is like a matador's cloak, a thin line of protection only serving to enrage the shark. He turns and charges again. Finally on the third pass the shark grasps the now terrified and floundering chick. The chick pecks vainly at the shark's nose, and then is pulled under. We glimpse a last flip of a foot and an oily slick rises to the surface.

*****

The researchers invite us on an underwater debris cleanup of the lagoon. We pile into orange Boston whaler towing a kayak and blast across the turquoise waters to the edge of the atoll. Snorkeling in a line of three we spread out to swim long transects covering the area systematically. Snapped to our weight belts are orange buoys that can be clipped to pieces of “ghost net” too entangled to remove by ourselves.

In 1998, 22,450 pounds of marine debris was collected around Midway. Some ports charge fishers to dispose of unwanted nets so they may discard them or purposely jettison them during violent storms. Ghost nets drift on their own catching whales, turtles and seabirds. Perhaps weighted by an animal they sink to the bottom of the sea where the rotting flesh of the animal falls out freeing the net to resurface and begin its killing cycle once more.

I have to remind myself to keep a search image for nets and debris because there are plenty of distractions. Turquoise coloured parrot fish the size of cocker spaniels nibble on corals, trailed by a retinue of wrasses - sharp-nosed little parasite picking fish. The bottom’s coral sands are as fine as talcum, slowly ground down by waves and milled by the crushing jaws of reef- eating fish. Under a piece of net that is partially buried in the sand I find a beautiful lemon coloured spotted eel-like creature. I wave Carl over to look and he pops out of the water and sings, "That's A MORAY " in his best Italian tones. Some of the pieces of net can be worked off the coral, others need to be cut, still others take a team effort. Wayne Sentman, a monk seal researcher tells us how a seal was found wrapped in rope. He later shows us a photo that that looks like someone tried to saw the seal in half and tired partway, "but somehow the animal survived," Wayne says. "When you save even one monk seal, you are really making a difference to the population."

As we are swimming in a line a Galapagos shark cruises by. I wave at Carl who is already on it. He makes the divers' shark sign - a hand like a dorsal fin to his head. The shark circles around and comes back toward me. I keep turning to face the shark that in turn keeps corkscrewing around me, clearly having a look. I stick my head out of the water and call out as coolly as I can, "Should we be worried about this?" "I don’t think so," he says, swiveling his head around. He’s more concerned about tiger sharks and is ever on the watch their unexpected arrival. The Galapagos shark veers off and continues on his way. Relieved, I paddle over to Safina who is now watching a black-footed albatross floating on the aqua waters. The newly fledged bird still has patches of his natal down on his neck and head, giving him a local yokel look. Underwater, I can see his black feet paddling towards us. Curious, he is checking us out. With our blue and yellow masks and snorkels we must be a strange sight. He stares at us with bright black eyes and we google back at him. Suddenly Safina's hand shoots out and grabs the bird by its long, gangly neck. The bird's face registers astonishment and so does mine. He lets it go just as fast. "Toast." he says. "That one would be toast if I were a tiger shark." The shocked adolescent bolts, feet pattering awkwardly across the water, wings flapping wildly, most inelegant for an albatross. Hopefully the chick learned a lesson that may later save its life.

*****

On Eastern Island we help with a chick census. Counting birds within a plot, we find five are missing. One chick reclines on a pile of feathers from one of his dead mates. Safina takes a picture of the skeletal remains of an albatross with a big pile of plastic in the centre. That was the bird’s stomach. Long after the birds are gone, these little pyramids of plastic mark where they died like a colourful tombstone.

Albatrosses are transmitters of plastic. Everywhere are little bits of blue and red ferried in from the sea. Why do these birds eat this stuff? More to the point, why do we dump it in the sea? Peter Pyle, a seabird researcher, smiles ruefully at my appalled expression, "In the days before plastics, everything that floated on the ocean's surface was edible, so the birds learned to eat whatever floated - usually squid or dead fish. Now that there's tons of plastics out there that’s what they are picking up. The currents are carrying the junk like a conveyor belt. Recently analysis of stuff show a lot of it is ship and river based. In Korea, toy soldiers are a big thing."

So are cigarette lighters, toothbrushes, tampon tubes, vacuum tubes and lids. It looks as though the cap of every plastic bottle in the world has landed here, delivered to an albatross chick by its parents. It's unbelievable. Pyle explains how the plastics take up space in the birds’ stomachs until they don't have room for food around all those toy soldiers and so the birds die indirectly of dehydration and starvation.

An adult albatross waddles up the beach, her head lowered, bobbing from side to side. Her mouth is open, and she pants with exertion. She's looking for her chick. Is it still alive? As she walks by chicks that aren't her own, she gives them a peck or two just in case they have any thoughts of horning in on the meal. "Ha-ha-ha-ha." She calls. A chick that resembles a frosted feather boa with legs and a bill, responds like it has just won the lottery and starts excitingly bouncing up and down. "Hee-hee-hee." Roused from a semi -comatose state, it rushes towards her and with laser-like purpose, works her to extract a meal. Making insistent referee-like toots it nibbles at the base of her bill, then slides its own beak scissor-like to force hers wider and wider open. The parent responds by retching and large dark chunks of calamari and purple fish roe come tumbling out like riches from a slot machine. The chick gobbles it down and both birds pause and lightly clatter their bills in unison. A moment later the chick begins again. There is an almost sexual intensity in their interaction. Straining to make the parent retch, the chick pecks faster and faster at its parent's bill. This time there is a thick oil, then something green. We watch with horror as a green toothbrush emerges halfway, slides across the chick's bill then back down the parent's throat. The chick keeps pestering her to cough it up. But for now at least, the tooth brush remains stuck in her gullet and the female having surrendered everything else, turns and walks determinedly back towards the sea to start her next shuttle.

*****

Evenings, we sit outside amidst the chicks and absorb this miracle of life. To the background music of their castanet-like bill clacking, Safina tells me stories of the faithfulness of albatross that burrow into my mind. How storms that sweep the atolls can send waves crashing over the birds, until they are buried up to their necks in sand, and still they sit immutable. How egg collectors set fires to the grasses of their breeding colonies to dislodge the incubating birds. How though their plumage caught fire, the birds would not move.

But now that the albatrosses' breeding sites are finally protected, we've learned that it's not enough. An island is not an island from the influences of the world. Albatross help teach us that we need to think about the affects we have, that are not at first obvious. If, like the ancient mariner, we want that second chance, we'll have to manage what is happening to albatrosses across all the areas they roam, from the mid Pacific to the BC, Alaska, Oregon and California coasts.

On this calm night on Midway Atoll, with a full moon silhouetting thousands of chicks, I realize that the answer to their survival lies as much near my west coast home, where an albatross parent is searching the sea for shimmering fish, as here, where a hungry chick anxiously awaits.