January 2009 For the love of Albatrosses I had a wonderful Christmas present from Toni this year; the book Albatrosses, Their World, their ways by Tui de Roy, mark Jones and Julian Fitter. I have read it avidly twice and just cannot put it down and it has raised still vivid memories of my first encounters with albatrosses six years ago in New Zealand. This book reminds me that it was Robert Cushman Murphy, a seabird researcher who, after seeing albatrosses for the first time stated ‘I now belong to a higher cult of mortals, for I have seen the albatross!’ Exactly so, I still feel immensely privileged to have been in close proximity to such beautiful creatures. The following are just two extracts from my book In the Footsteps of my daughter: a Wildlife Odyssey, written after my first round-the-world trip from which I hope you will gain some impression of how I felt at that time late in 2002. Monday 25th November 2002 This day will live in my memory forever. Bruce collects us at 9am for his pelagic boat trip and we quickly motor out to sea. As we close in on a fishing boat, the skipper is in the process of gutting his catch and we come on over 50 shy mollymawks, or to be more precise New Zealand white-capped mollymawks. I am simply awe-struck by their sculpted faces, their sheer numbers, inter-dispersed with cape pigeons, giant, diving and white-chinned petrels, skuas and all the other rag-tag assortment of gulls. An albatross wheels above the water, the lower wing tip millimetres above the wave tops. Red-billed gulls dive in quickly to snatch pieces of fish guts only to be immediately set upon by packs of the much larger southern black-backed gulls and the skuas: few escape, the muggers are just too large and too efficient. I gaze in awe from a distance of only six feet directly into the dark eye of an albatross. It holds my gaze without blinking and I find this eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation incredibly moving. It has a beautiful head of pure white, a black eye-stripe and huge grey beak tipped with yellow. Of the seven people on board, two are busy throwing up over the side. It is not too rough, but taking photos is not easy. Bruce is obviously disappointed with the few species but the weather is too calm and there is not enough lift for the even bigger birds he had hoped for. He does his best to play the odds and knows where and when to look, but many people do not understand that he cannot call up nature to order. An Englishman, with a loud voice, appears disinterested in most of the birds. Here we are in a small boat in one of the southernmost oceans with unique birdlife all around us and yet when two rare penguins are spotted he exclaims, “I have already ticked them”, and cannot even bother to lift his binoculars to look at them. This is the difference between a birder such as me and a twitcher, or even worse a big lister, like him. He appears disinterested in the world about him, being purely intent on seeing the few birds left for him to see on his world bird list. There will never be any danger of me getting like that – I am far too interested in everything going on around me. And then on Friday 6th December 2002 Hitomi is working her way around New Zealand. She is tiny, totally manic and when she walks she sticks her bottom out and shuffles along like pictures of little old Japanese ladies. Brent does not enjoy her sitting next to him when he drives: she is prone, whenever she sees a friend, to grabbing the wheel, winding down the window and shouting out their name. She is a total scream. She cleans for Brent and his wife and is extremely thorough. Brent’s philosophy is simple. “If you want the cleaning done properly, give the job to a woman: men do not care in the same way – they are wired up differently”. This, of course, infuriates many of those who listen to him, but his words came back to me when we stayed at a hostel in Sydney and where our cleaner was a bloke. His standard of cleaning was not good. It is a great morning for a boat trip, with a mere two-metre swell as we pass the point. As we admire the scalloped limestone coastline and the mighty Kaikoura Peninsula, with its breeding grounds of fur seals and seabirds, the skipper opens the throttle and the boat surges through the water, heading straight out into the ocean for about five miles, to the edge of the great Hikurango Trench, where we hope to see albatrosses and where giant squid are said to live. Mind you, there are always those for whom even the slightest swell upsets and this trip is no exception: before long a number of those seated on the rear platform are busy ‘feeding the fish.’ This is another of those magical mornings and encounter number three, the best yet, with albatrosses. I am in love with an albatross. OK, and Toni as well and thankfully she does not eat fish the same way an albatross does. That is, all in one gulp, and raw! To see the giant wandering albatross sailing in with its ten-foot wingspan is an unforgettable sight. The largest ocean bird, it does not have the haughty mien of the smaller shy mollymawks, but all are suffering greatly from longline fishing practiced by the many foreign nations who over-fish these waters. Their fishing lines are 100-200 kms long and it is no surprise albatrosses go for the baited hooks. Unfortunately, they get caught on these and drown. It is estimated that 300,000 seabirds die in this manner every year. This unintended slaughter in the albatross capital of the world is causing much concern and stricter regulations are being imposed on fisheries within New Zealand waters. This may be easier said than done judging by the way some of the Japanese and Spanish boats operate, but anything that can be done to minimise seabird mortality, protect albatrosses and petrels is to be applauded. Even fishermen, not normally renowned for listening to anyone, are becoming concerned about seabird mortality rates. Strangely, it is still not known why some boats catch no birds, whilst others catch far too many. Seabird scaring devices are being installed, crews are encouraged not to dispose of offal overboard during line and net setting and to reduce the amount of light shone at night during setting. Now every bird casualty has to be recorded on New Zealand boats. It cannot be easy though. There is one species of albatross that can dive to a depth of twelve metres; the majority dive between one to five metres. On the other hand, sooty shearwaters can go to a depth of 67 metres. I recall the words of Chief Seattle, who is supposed to have said, “Every part of the earth is sacred to my people. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves. The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life: he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. Contaminate your bed, and you will one night suffocate in your own waste”. How well he would have understood the greed that drives nations such as Japan and Spain to plunder international waters of fish and how he would have abhorred the killing of so many magnificent creatures, only to be left to rot in the water or eaten by carrion. I particularly dislike the way Japanese cut off shark fins, only to throw the bodies back into the water. We will mourn the passing of these creatures and live to regret allowing greedy people to wreak this terrible havoc.
As we speed back towards the shore, the skipper explains that he is not licenced to show us any dolphins but if he comes close to any he is obliged to drop his speed to avoid damaging these incredible creatures. Seconds later, the engine noise changes and we rapidly lose way. Almost immediately we are bang in the middle of a pod of hundreds of dusky dolphins. They are all around us, the water boiling and seething, as they churn around the boat, apparently enjoying the spectacle of us watching them, as much as the sight of them delights us. Have you ever noticed that whenever you show anyone a dolphin in the wild, that person smiles? It goes without saying that we have a boat full of smiling people. Slowly we drift through these delightful creatures and pick up speed again only to slow down again five minutes later. There are four small, and highly endangered, Hector’s dolphins right alongside the boat. They surf the waves, before tiring of our company and head out to sea again. We have not been able to book to swim with the dolphins, but this has been a great bonus for us. Of the 40 species of seabirds to be seen off Kaikoura during the course of a whole year, we have seen twenty three, including six species of albatrosses, six shearwaters and four petrels. We are truly blessed! I did, however, get to ponder this practice of feeding and luring in the birds with shark livers. It is little wonder that they have learnt to follow fishing boats for food, with all the attendant dangers.
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