ONE July, years ago, I stood on the beach at Tern
Island in Hawaii's northwest chain, and watched a Laysan albatross feed
its chick. I'll always remember it.
It was late in the breeding season and this was one of
the few albatrosses still feeding. The goose-sized parent landed clumsily
near its enormous chick, then began some rather ungraceful heaving and
shuddering to bring up its food.
The chick, so fat it looked like a beanbag with legs,
waddled to the newly arrived parent and began begging. The parent,
however, would not be rushed. It turned its back and continued
regurgitating.
When dinner was finally served, I was surprised: The
chick didn't put its beak down the parent's throat, as I expected, but
rather, the parent grasped the chick's beak sideways.
To picture this, think of a pair of scissors trying to
cut across the blades of a second pair of scissors.
How can this work? I wondered. It looked impossible for
the parent to actually get any food inside that baby's beak.
It worked just fine, of course, because it wasn't solid
fish the parent was delivering, but fish oil, a vile-smelling brown liquid
that dripped from the parent's beak into the chick's. A bit spilled onto
their snow-white chest feathers.
When the feeding was over, the satisfied chick settled
down for a snooze and the parent took off once again to the wild blue
yonder.
I watched the big bird head out to sea. Where is it
going? I wondered, as it disappeared into the horizon. And how will it
ever get back?
Albatross researchers still don't know how these
seabirds find their way back to Tern Island, but they recently learned
where some of them go for food to feed their chicks -- all the way to San
Francisco and Alaska.
Such great distances seem improbable, but by attaching
radio tags to 26 of Tern Island's albatrosses, researchers from Wake
University in North Carolina can now track the birds' exact paths.
Three black-footed albatrosses (close cousins of
Laysans) flew over 2,600 miles from Tern Island to the California coast
and back. One Laysan went to the Aleutian Islands in Alaska, over 2,000
miles away, came back to Tern, stayed one day, then went back to the
Aleutians.
Albatrosses can cover these astounding distances
because they are masters of flight, soaring on the winds with such
efficiency that they exert little energy of their own.
They also store food in the form of fish oil, using the
nonfat parts for their own survival, then bringing the calorie-rich liquid
home to their chicks. Because of this, albatross chicks grow fat, thus
surviving for weeks between feedings.
You can follow this ongoing albatross tracking on the
Internet at http://www.wfu.edu/albatross.
The study is sponsored by Wake University and the National Science
Foundation.
