Like someone surprised on the loo, he sits helplessly, the baby albatross, on the raised round pan of his nest. What dignity the bird commands springs from innocence alone. Lifted on to an upturned bowl of sticks and mud a foot or more above the plain and visible to the horizon in all directions, the gulping chick's exposure would be the more cruel if there were anyone to laugh; but you can't be ludicrous all on your own, can you?
The cabin where I write is in the middle of one of those plains on Kerguelen where giant albatross come to raise their young: one chick only, every two years. About 300 yards from my door is such a chick, quite small, on his nest; a few hundred yards further on, another, larger baby albatross waits. From that nest you can see two or three more, just behind the beach.
Walk along the ocean front and the grassy edge behind you is punctured with nests.
I have visited many of the chicks. I know where to find them now, though only from this cabin, not from Australia as their parents could. At each nest a chick waits, unsheltered. The bird nearest my cabin is waiting now, in the dark, as I write. He will be there at dawn, watching around. A month ago the chick was there, rather smaller. A fortnight hence he will still be there, rather bigger, and in between a dozen gales will have blown and nothing else will have happened.
When the snow came heavily four days ago he did not move, could not; he sat through the blizzard as snow piled around and clapped his beak, softly when I arrived to photograph him, very buttermilk against the snowdrift. Yesterday a stinging rain slanted down, thawing the snow. The chick blinked and dozed. Today a freezing fog has been blowing from the north. The chick has lost sight of the next nest, but that never mattered to him anyway. I say "chick", but this baby is bigger
than a goose, his nest a couple of feet wide and his beak as long as your boot. And yet a chick he is: the duvet coat of fluffy-cream, downy as a dandelion head, proclaim the newness of this world to the bird. He cannot fly. All he has done since hatching is sit.
And so he sits. Wide-eyed and wingless, beholding his beholder with a kind of goofy anxiety: neither fear nor confidence hardening his soft round eyes. All he knows is that something is approaching him, and he has never seen one of these before, Go close and he will snap his beak repeatedly with a curiously soft snap-snap and try to rise on unsteady legs. That is all he will do, all, indeed, he can do. He is helpless on his throne, and his parents are hundreds of miles away.
How can I convey the absurdity of a landscape of albatross nests? Mass-solitariness is the key to their distribution. Consider the spread of rural bungalows in the west of Ireland where no planning restrictions seem to apply. Every householder's dream has been of privacy. None sited themselves too close to anyone else, yet no large area is
left unpricked by a domestic
dwelling.
Something similar motivates the great albatross, most solitary of birds, mated for life but lacking any kind of gregariousness. They neither flock nor (apparently) communicate. And here in Kerguelen they have built their dream homes. The landscape is trackless and empty: flat meadow, marsh and moss, near a restless Indian Ocean which stretches away for thousands of miles.
There is no mark of humanity, but on land, all the way to the horizon, white dots punctuate the browny-green. They are sparse, seldom nearer each other than 50 yards, never clustered.
Each is an albatross chick stationed surveying (if he cared to) the next, who can just about see the next, like relays of lookouts in little personal mud watchtowers - except that I strongly suspect the chick hasn't the least idea that he is an albatross chick, or that the other one over there is. They are unlikely to meet. He has not experienced an albatross get-together, nor ever will. He is one. He is alone. He has never looked in a mirror. He can only see out.
Whether he knows he is waiting for a parent to return from the sea I doubt, but when that 9ft wingspan fills his sky, instinct - or recognition - is immediate. I watched a homecoming this morning. The chick reached up and popped his smaller beak into the parent's larger one. Seafood - a sort of oily, squiddy mulch, apparently - was disgorged from big neck to small. This refuelling continued for quite some time - but then it had to last, for when the
parent left it might be for weeks, for thousands of miles, perhaps as far as Antarctica, wheeling out over the Southern Ocean, tipping the water, riding the wave-made air currents.
For an albatross can really only glide. The bird would be better described as a super-efficient self-launching glider than a flyer. Without wind he cannot take off and to watch him try is hilarious. Yet the air is his habitat. Like the chick on his loo-throne, an adult albatross on land gives the impression of being unavoidably detained. Even a chick who has never flown exudes from every feather a sense of being where he oughtn't and knowing it. "Can't stay! Must fly" is a message woven into his genes.
I watched as the parent disgorged. There was none of the suckling mother's contentment in its eyes. And when it was over there seemed to be little parental contact. The big bird sat for a while some yards from its chick, gazing vacantly in another direction, apparently unconcerned when I approached the nest. Later, when I looked, the parent had gone. The chick was alone again, staring from the nest. Another long wait lay ahead. It was like being visited by your parents at boarding
school. As the chick grows, the parental visit - at first every day - will become less and less frequent. Finally, a year from hatching, the young bird gets out of his nest and teaches himself to fly. He will not mate until he is nine.
What does he know of this? In those vacant black buttons of eyes how infinite a knowledge of winds and currents and wave tops, of where the fish are, of how to catch an upgust by the slightest flick of a wingtip, waits, all unconscious, to be unlocked. All the points of the compass are there, maps without number, almost known - and yet not known.
There are said to be about 40,000 breeding pairs of great albatross left in the world, many of them nesting here on Kerguelen. Sometimes I see a nest with a dead chick lying in it - before the skuas and giant petrels come and peck the fluff into bones and leather. The little bird's parents probably never returned from the sea.
The trailing lines of the dolphin-friendly tuna-fishers who (in these eco-conscious days) no longer use nets, are the main culprits. Tuna nets were harmless to birds; lines catch albatross and drown them. Do an albatross a favour tomorrow: choose dolphin-unfriendly tuna.
I shall turn in now for bed. I don't know if I can express - whether you will catch - the strangeness of lying in my sleeping bag and knowing that not so far away that goofy bird is sitting there alone on his nest, now, and that there are hundreds like him out there. So many white dots. Random as they seem, each, whether or not it knows this, whether or not it knows anything, is the object of the complete devotion, whether or not they know it, of two larger white
specks somewhere out in the Roaring Forties and Fifties over the great Southern Ocean. How wonderful to be given a life so directed.
In St Oswald's Church in Ashbourne, Derbyshire, is the tomb of a little girl, Penelope Boothby, a precocious scholar and her parents' only child, on whom they had lavished an elaborate education. Beneath an affecting sculpture in the whitest marble of the sleeping child, are engraved the words (I quote from memory): "Her parents invested their all in this frail craft. When it foundered, the wreck was total."
In each frail craft of fluff and beak here at Ratmanoff, all the dreams of two great albatross somewhere between Australia, Antarctica and South Africa are invested, and they know how to find their way back to him. And if I wake in the night, or if I don't, he will still be there, alone, unmoved; and when I go, and if I come back, and if I don't. I hope his parents come back. And he? I don't suppose an albatross hopes.
