Never received higher praise

By Hob Osterlund, Safina Center Fellow

The text below is an excerpt from the opening paragraphs of my book Holy Moli: Albatross and Other Ancestors (Oregon State University Press, 2016.)  I include it here to encourage further conversation about the birds’ story in Hawaii as well as the significant intersection they share with humans. 

I sat cross-legged in a grove of ironwood trees on the north shore of Kaua‘i. The ground was spongy with years of fallen needles, ruddy as the dirt. Wispy branches rippled in the gentle trade winds. Sounds of the forest swirled like smoke: the surge of the surf below, the trill of songbirds, the balmy breeze. It smelled like rain.

A party was rocking on the plateau above me. One by one, adolescent Laysan albatross—known as mōlī in Hawaiian—were arriving from their rounds of other coastal colonies. All of them were crazy for court- ship. They stood on tiptoes, pointed their bills skyward, and made music in the manner of their clan everywhere. Some notes were high-pitched like children screeching with joy in the waves of Hanalei Bay, some were low and plaintive like monks chanting Buddhist mantras. The birds bobbed themselves into oblivion, lost as dervishes in the dance.

Prior to my having the opportunity to monitor these magnificent beings, most of my knowledge about birds came from three sources: my nature-loving mother, the pigeons I raised as a young girl, and my undergraduate studies in ecology at Cal Berkeley. My awareness of albatross, however, was limited to the misleading metaphor from the eighteenth-century epic poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The familiar expression albatross around your neck connotes a heavy burden, an endless problem, an inescapable legacy.

It’s a bad rap, and wholly undeserved. In The Rime, a benevolent albatross leads a marooned ship to safety, saving the lives of all the sailors on board. One of the mariners gets drunk and kills the mōlī with his crossbow. Just so, the wind perishes. In retaliation, the mariner’s ship- mates—all of them now dying of thirst—force the mariner to wear the bird’s big body around his neck as a symbol of his ignorance.

In the centuries since, The Rime’s avian hero somehow morphed from innocent to guilty in the collective human imagination. It’s a good act, but nothing could be further from the truth. No matter what mea- sure you use, mōlī characteristics are superlative. They live longer in the wild than most—if not all—feathered species. The current title “oldest known wild bird in the world” is held by Wisdom, a sixty-four-year- old who still raises babies and appears forever young, indistinguishable from birds six decades her junior. Albatross are peerless parents. Mothers and fathers work equally hard at the rigors of rearing a chick. Laysans fly the equivalent of New York to San Francisco round trip just to deliver dinner to their chicks. Adults forage millions of square miles of the North Pacific, from British Columbia to Japan, then somehow manage to find their postage-stamp-sized nesting grounds without the help of a single landmark. Hawaiian colonies have a significant presence of female-female pairs, a phenomenon not well known in other nonhuman animals. As a rule, albatross are peace loving. They wouldn’t recognize a predator if it walked up and bit them on their bills. In Hawai‘i they are considered ‘aumākua, cherished ancestors and guardian spirits.

As impressive as Wisdom is, there’s at least one other notable pioneer, a bird we’ll call Makani. Although albatross typically practice extraordinary fidelity to their hatch sites, our hero chose another option. She flew south to Kaua‘i, an island where her species had likely been extirpated a millennium before. Like the vast majority of Laysans, she grew up on Midway Atoll. Why did she bypass such an enormous pool of potential mates and travel more than one thousand miles in the opposite direction of her family and primary food source? Why did she leave her home and risk the dangers of an island with a sizable census of humans?

Makani ultimately found a mate, brought him home, and raised a baby. All the hundreds of chicks hatched on Kaua‘i since 1979 owe her a debt of gratitude, as do all future generations. They fly on the wings of her courage and wayfinding.

I squinted through my telephoto to freeze-frame the mōlī singles bar scene above me. The birds used more than a dozen dance steps, synchronizing moves like the bow, the stare, and the whinny. There was the head flick, the bill clapper, and the sky snap. The bill-under-wing posture resembled Kevin Kline’s armpit sniff in A Fish Called Wanda. The rapid bill touching looked like Olympic fencing parries, and the mutual moo seemed frankly ecstatic. Collectively the movements appeared to be a creative dance depiction of an entire albatross lifespan, a collage of positions of nest building, food begging, flight takeoffs, walking, napping, and lovemaking. It was all there, their story, a living ritual and a rowdy celebration.

With wingspans as wide as Kobe Bryant is tall, you’d think the birds would be hefty. Not at all. The basketball player’s body is about thirty times heavier than theirs. Partly constructed with air sacs, their structure is supported by a skeleton of hollow bones. Imagine an inflated football. Cover it with feathers, white on the torso and dark chocolate on the wings, then add wide webbed feet. Put on a head with intelligent dark eyes. Add a pinkish bill with a sharp grey tip that can tickle or tear flesh, depending. Add more feathered footballs with their groove on, and you’ve got yourself a bash.

I was so focused on the party I didn’t notice an animal coming up behind me until it was too late. I turned my head, my heart in my throat. There was no need for fear. It was an albatross headed up the hill. Her webs were as supple as goatskin gloves. Her footsteps created an almost inaudible crunch in the ironwood litter, like the sound of your fingertips on your scalp when you run your hand through your hair.

“Hey,” I whispered gratefully, my anxiety dissipating. The bird gave no indication she shared either my fright or my relief. In fact, she took no notice of me at all. Since mōlī usually nest on uninhabited Hawaiian Islands with no native predators, most of them haven’t learned to regard humans with any particular alarm. This albatross only had eyes for the boogie on the bluff. She stepped on my foot as she padded past. I was as irrelevant as a root.

I’d never received higher praise.