A is for Albatross

I have been fortunate enough to visit a group of islands off the Falklands called Grand Jason and Steeple Jason. These two islands have the largest colonies of Black Browed Albatross. The wing span of this bird is between 200 – 240 cm tip to tip, that is over 2 meters long. I remember lying on my back in the tussock grass listening to their mighty wings whooshing in the air above my head as they came in to land. Their nests are a mound of mud and grass with a little dip in the middle for the egg when breeding. The pairs mate for life and with their amazing detection system can find their partner and babies in the mass of birds in their colony. Albatross need an up-draft of wind to fly, they will use their wings for take off, the rest of the flight and landing is done by gliding on the wind. They can be in the air for several hours without flapping their wings at all. In days gone by, sailors would capture Albatross to make tobacco pipe stems from their long wing bones. It was thought to be very bad luck for your ship if you caught an Albatross, the 617 lines of Coleridge’s poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, tells the tale of a ship that was guided out of the ice by an Albatross, the sailors befriend the Albatross but one of the mariners shoots it, and the ship is becalmed for days. A line from the poem has become a catch-phrase: water, water everywhere nor any drop to drink’. The mariners, so angry with the guilty sailor believing he had cursed the ship, make him wear the dead Albatross around his neck as his penance.