Eye of the Albatross: Visions of Hope and Survival

Rating:
Summary: More than just winging it
Review: As a vice-president of Audubon, the founder of their Living Oceans program, a contributor on fishery management policy-making, the author of SONG FOR THE BLUE OCEAN, and an early life as a fisherman, Carl Safina is certainly not simply "winging it" when it comes to discussing oceans and their environmental health.

This book is beautifully written and is a passionate call for us to care for our oceans. It offers all the following: natural history, study of a bird species, travelogue, environmental science, oceanography, cultural and economic commentary, and finally, a geography and history lesson. Starting where he always does, Safina begins with a focus on his main interest - the huge ecosystem that is the worlds oceans. We take the perspective of the masters of the oceanic skies - the albatross - and Safina is creative in using a tagged and satellite-tracked individual bird "Amelia" to give us a unique look through the EYE OF THE ALBATROSS.

Safina is somewhat of a romantic visionary and has a gift for the poetic phrase. The images however are not all about beautiful seascapes, tropical islands and exotic ports-of-call. Hardly. His description of a feeding scene between a mother albatross and her chick at a nesting colony is literally gut-wrenching. After being fed by its parent on regurgigated squid "the chick begs for more. The adult arches her neck and retches again. Nothing comes". Although Safina has a penchant for criticizing human economics and uses this case to do so, we can't help but see his point as he continues. "Slowly comes the surreal sight of a green plastic toothbrush emerging from the bird's gullet. With her neck arched, the mother cannot fully pass the straight brush. She tries several times to disgorge it, but can't." The economic message from the perspective of the albatross seems to be that "consumer culture permeates every watery point on the compass."

There is no doubt that the intention of this book is to evoke emotions that will bring about action to ameliorate environmental conditions. To that extent Safina is a scrupulous scientist and he makes us sit up and take note when he says that in addition to the 80 million tons of sea creatures that fishing annually harvests from the worlds oceans, there is a further 20 million tons of "unwanted" fish, seabirds, and marine mammals that gets "thrown overboard, dead." Safina was instrumental in banning drift-nets and is now working to make fishing grounds "sea-bird-safe". He and others are proposing changes in long-line fishing. In Alaska alone 14,000 sea birds are lost annually when they drown after swallowing baited hooks and get entangled in the nets. A change such as dyeing the bait so that birds can't see it would seem to be a fairly straightforward solution. The labyrinth official, diplomatic, and political obstacle course that must be navigated however means that nothing is simple.

Safina is a steady advocate for change and remains optimistic. He keeps us soaring with our bird guide. Why not, as "almost everything about the albatross is superlative and extreme." We learn that they can live for more than fifty years and over a lifetime can log about four million miles flying. They routinely go on 2,000 mile foraging trips. Wandering is not only the name of the largest of the species (diomedea exulans) it is also the most appropriate adjective to describe these wondrous birds. They can be found from the Antarctic to the far north and frequently fly through both tropical and frigid north Atlantic stormy skies in a single voyage.

This is a thoroughly enjoyable journey and an environmentally educational experience with a unique birds-eye view written by an artistic wordsmith.

Rating:
Summary: Good Air Days
Review: BOOK REVIEW
Good air days
Carl Safina's portrait of a seabird named Amelia
By Bill McKibben, 9/15/2002
Eye of the Albatross: Visions of Hope and Survival
By Carl Safina
Henry Holt, 377 pp., illustrated.
Until very recently, Samuel Taylor Coleridge could have passed as a scientific authority on the albatross. We knew that they flew a long way, but beyond that the bird was basically an enigma.
No more. Working with field biologists who have begun strapping tiny global positioning units to the birds, Carl Safina has produced a truly magnificent biography of a single bird, Amelia, a Laysan albatross who nests on a small islet northwest of Hawaii. As it turns out, though, to call that islet her ''home'' would be a great exaggeration. As soon as her solitary chick is hatched, Amelia roams far and wide, 25,000 miles through a quadrant of the North Pacific that stretches from the tropics to the Aleutians, as she searches for food to carry home and regurgitate for her growing youngster.
And that is only the beginning. Albatrosses turn out to be remarkable in an almost uncountable number of ways. They are long-lived (the oldest banded birds are at least 60 years old - but it's hard to keep track because they tend to outlive researchers). They can commute in a matter of days between sunbaked equatorial waters and snow-filled Arctic skies without it causing them a problem. And, with wings that lock in place like a switchblade, they are most relaxed in the air. How relaxed? Safina says juveniles appear to ''fly continuously for five years'' before they land to make their first nesting attempts.
As with any great biography, Safina provides plenty of detail about the other creatures that populate Amelia's life. We learn of the monk seals that share her nesting island, of the tiger sharks that prowl its lagoons, of the squid that provide her diet, and of the small band of people that study her species, the academics and volunteers who spend five months at a stretch on these most remote specks of rock anywhere on earth. These are people so devoted that they arrive at the islands wearing clothes freshly pulled from the freezer lest they inadvertently bring ashore some alien grass or ant. It is, in a word, inspiring, a Jacques Cousteau special brought even more vividly to the printed page.
It is also, at times, very depressing. It almost goes without saying that something this beautiful and ancient is embattled. For a long time humans killed albatrosses and other seabirds on purpose, wiping out many species in the search for food. Now, we kill them mostly by accident, but in great numbers: They are pulled beneath the sea to drown when they go after bait attached to the hooks of long-lining fishermen; their nests are washed away when rising seas, pushed by global warming, sweep across their islets; and perhaps most insidiously, they are increasingly hard pressed to find food, perhaps because humans are mining so much of the oceans' protein. Our species already uses 40 percent of the earth's ''primary productivity,'' the plants and animals produced by the solar energy hitting our globe - this book brings home in stark fashion just what that number means.
Safina is no doomsayer, however. As the director of the Audubon Society's Living Oceans program, he has done as much as anyone save Cousteau to change our relationship with the aquatic world. Here he memorably describes a fishing trip in Alaskan waters with a skipper who has developed both strategies and attitudes necessary to prevent hooking the great birds - he and his crew share Safina's wonder in the face of the birds, and make it clear that much, though perhaps not enough, has changed with our species in the last century.
This book should accelerate that change, at least regarding albatrosses, for Safina's picture of the birds is one of the most delightful natural history studies in decades (and one of the most beautifully produced, with the maps and photos necessary for a complete understanding of the text). In the end, what sticks with you is less the birds' athletic feats, but their ... depth. Safina writes that these long-lived animals mate year after year with the same partner. In the first few years, their courtship is exuberant, filled with long and wild dancing sessions meant to demonstrate commitment and fitness. As the years go on, however, and the pair become used to each other, the language of courtship is stripped down to a lovely, regular preening. He describes one pair sitting on the beach ''for many long minutes, nibbling tenderly around each other's faces, taking turns preening each other with extraordinary gentleness, each bird soaking it up as though this is the greatest luxury. ... You sense that is immensely pleasurable for them - something anyone who has ever been tenderly touched would recognize.'' Much the same could be said of this tender, touching volume.
Bill McKibben is a visiting scholar at Middlebury College and the author of ''The End of Nature.''
This story ran on page E8 of the Boston Globe on 9/15/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.

Rating:
Summary: Booklist Review
Review: From Booklist:
*STARRED REVIEW* Safina, Carl. Eye of the Albatross: Visions of Hope and Survival. May 2002. 416p. illus. index. Holt/John Marcae, (0-8050-6228-9). 598.4.

The Wandering Albatross, a magnificent seabird built for gliding and endurance, travels millions of miles over the course of its long life as it wings from the tiny tropical islands on which it breeds to the subarctic waters in which it feeds and back again. Safina, an insightful, reform-minded, and splendidly literary scientist in the manner of Rachel Carson, employs one particular albatross, dubbed Amelia and outfitted with a transmitter for satellite tracking, as his guide to the ocean world in this riveting marine chronicle. As he did in SONG FOR THE BLUE OCEAN (1997), Safina, a MacArthur "genius" and Lannan Literary Award winner, explicates and celebrates the wonders of the sea, and details and decries our species' destructive impact on it. "Everything people are doing to the ocean, albatrosses feel," Safina writes, describing such wrethced sights as adult seabirds being pulled to their death by fishing nets and hooks, or regurgitating toothbrushes and cigarette lighters along with food for hungry chicks. But Safina contrasts a sobering overview of past and present abominations with lively accounts of the corrective endeavors of enlightened marine biologists to support his optimistic view of an ecologically sound future. Communication is key to positive change, and Safina's superlative report is both catalyst and inspiration.

-Donna Seaman

//

In this beautifully written work, Safina blends history and science
to offer, in a seamlessly telescoped style, first an ecosystem, then a
species, and finally one bird, the last as compellingly drawn as the
protagonist of a novel. The general reader cannot fail to be pulled deeply
into natural history by reading it.

--Edward O. Wilson, Harvard University

Rating:
Summary: it soars
Review: from the May 16, 2002 edition - [...]

By Colin Woodard

Humans and albatrosses have a lot in common. We both live for many decades, possibly a century. Our reproductive patterns are similar. Albatrosses take as long as 13 years to mature, engage in courtships that can last two years or more, and raise a single chick every other year (or three to four years for some species.) Albatrosses, like ourselves, are found from the Antarctic to the Far North and most places in between.

Of course, we spend our time on earth very differently. Albatrosses spend 95 percent of it at sea, usually in flight. They come ashore only to breed and nest, and even then they are constantly flying off on 2,000- to 3,000-mile foraging runs to collect each feeding for their chick. They can fly for many days without stopping, sleeping on the wing, wandering from tropical to subpolar seas in the course of a single foraging run.

Carl Safina wondered what we might learn about the world if we could see it from their perspective. Now, after shadowing these great birds by foot, ship, and satellite, he has painted a beautiful, awe-inspiring tableau of our world as you've never seen it: an interconnected universe of wind and waves, sun-blasted islands, teeming polar seas, broad-winged birds, and the far-reaching effects of civilization.

"Almost everything about the albatross is superlative and extreme," Safina writes. They're huge, with an 11-foot wingspan. Masters of long-distance flight, they use less energy soaring over a stormy sea than they do while sitting quietly on their nests. They endure equatorial heat and ferocious Arctic storms, sometimes on the same feeding trip. And they travel far: By 50 years of age, a typical albatross has logged nearly 4 million miles.

Tracking them, Safina journeys to beaches covered with egg-laying sea turtles, crystalline Pacific waters filled with prowling tiger sharks, and island tern colonies so vast they're likened to "a white-noise cyclone of sound."

But today, albatrosses' lives are tangled up with those of humans. Though their world is far removed from civilization, they're inundated with pesticides, antibiotics, and hormone mimics. They swallow bottle caps and cigarette lighters, become entangled in drift nets, or drown after seizing one of the millions of baited hooks dragged behind fishing vessels every year.

"Eye of the Albatross" relates some unforgettable scenes. At one point, Safina watches an albatross chick feeding from the mouth of its mother, just back from a 2,000-mile foraging trip. The chick gulps down globs of regurgitated squid and fish eggs, but then the mother has difficulty retching up the next serving. "Slowly, the tip - just the tip - of a green plastic toothbrush emerges from the bird's throat," a sight Safina describes as "one of the most piercing things I've ever experienced." The mother, unable to pass this bit of trash, wanders away from her squawking chick.

The lesson, Safina writes, is that there are no longer any places on earth unaffected by man. "No matter what coordinates you choose, from waters polar to solar coral reefs, to the remotest turquoise atoll - no place, no creature remains apart from you and me."

Fortunately, in some places people are starting to correct the situation. Safina visits Midway Atoll, where the military accidentally introduced rats, which bred voraciously and extinguished entire nesting colonies. But since control of Midway passed to the National Wildlife Service, the rats have been eradicated, and the birds are recovering. In Alaska, Safina goes to sea with Mark Lundsten, a commercial fisherman leading the effort to save albatrosses from hooks. Lundsten has found a simple and cost-effective way to reduce albatross mortality by 90 percent with a combination of weights and streamers.

Safina, who earned a PhD studying seabirds, established himself as a leading voice in marine conservation with his first book, "Song for the Blue Ocean," which drew attention to the environmental catastrophe unfolding beneath the waves. "Eye of the Albatross" is an eloquent sequel, a moving depiction of how interconnected life on this planet truly is.

• Colin Woodard is author of 'Ocean's End: Travels Through Endangered Seas' (Basic).

from the May 16, 2002 edition - [...]

Rating:
Summary: A Glimpse at Nature's Wonders
Review: From time to time, Safina does tend to anthropomorphize, but it does make the book more accessible. And at other times he steps back just a little too far from the role he has written for himself. But there is nothing else to criticize in this excellent book.

Five hours northwest of the main Hawaiian Islands by propjet there are series of islands and atolls that are the breeding grounds of tens of thousands of sea birds. Of the many species of birds that breed there, the largest, the one that must be wrapped in the most superlatives, is the Laysan Albatross. And one Laysan Albatross, that Safina names Amelia, is the principle subject and unifying thread of this book.

From Coelridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" to the horrifying pollution of our ocean, Amelia is the eye through which we view her astonishing world. Amelia is tagged with a small satellite transmitter, and Safina includes maps showing the travels Amelia makes to feed herself and her chick. The distances beggar the imagination. Through her eyes and her journeys, Safina touches on the host of issues and breathtaking wonders of the the fauna of the Northwest Hawaiian Islands.

It's a tour de force, and I recommend it to you.

Rating:
Summary: Flying Around the World
Review: I found Carl Safina's latest work superb. The passages where the reader explores the sea with the eyes and nose of the albatross are the high points for this reader.You're there, out at sea, hunting with that bird. Only a creative book written by a scientist who writes like a dream could take a person into the body and experience of such a magnificent creature.