Bird of the Week – Light-mantled Sooty Albatross
If there is a family of birds that, to WC, epitomizes the ocean, it’s the Albatrosses. Coming ashore only to breed, this is a family of birds that lives on the wind and waves. And surely the most handsome of the albatrosses is the Light-mantled Sooty.
Light-mantled Sooty Albatross, Phoebetria palpebrata
It’s one of the smaller albatross species, but it isn’t a small bird. An adult is about three feet long and has a wingspan of more than seven feet. For a big bird, it is elegant and grateful in flight, its wingtips just fractions of an inch above the waves. Like far too many ocean-foraging birds, it is under threat from long-line fishing. There are believed to be about 58,000 birds, but the population is declining.
The whitish crescent behind the eye and the line along the lower mandible make this an easy species to identify. It’s a circum-Antarctic species, ranging from the edge of the ice to about 40° S latitude.
For more bird images, please visit Frozen Feather Images.
AK -Pi, biology is profligate and thinks nothing of waste. I’ll coin a term. The Ecological Imperitive.
Before elaborating on it, I will await comments.
A storied bird to be sure. I believe they are most common in the southern oceans. They are built like gliders, meant to ride the winds effortlessly. But they are mostly solitary except when they congregate to breed.It is hard to imagine anything more magnificent than the freedom of the winds. One wonders how they may fare when they accidentally encounter a typhooon. Do they alight and ride it out on the waves, or do they stick to the gale and frolic on the bursts of wind using their incredible lift to weight ratio to defy the universal force of
gravity and eye us clumsy and confused bipeds washing to and fro on the decks of our rusty buckets?
WC – your web site is unuseable by those of us with more primitive browsers. That is a pity.
There are some other remarkable birds such as the arctic tern that deserve notice. Birds are certainly remarkable cretures. A part of our world that most of us do not even much notice. But vital.
Perhaps it would be worth while to ask, what do others think the word ecology means? Does anyone know of what currently are the most accepted ecological theories respecting such questions as whether
or not the global ecology is sensitive to certain conditions to the extent that it might unravel if they are
exceeded? I know virtually nothing of these things but I can intuite from the complexity of things I do know
well how abstruse it would be to attempt to quantify ecology on almost any scale, let alone globally.
It is difficult to see ourselves in an objective way compared with the quotidian. We are incorporated in it.
Some of us are conditioned to disbelieve that small slow incremental changes can work enourmous differences over a long enough period of time. Some of us cannot even rationalize the idea of deep time..
As if we can tread water in mid ocean thinking the bottom of the pool is only a few feet away.
The telling thing is that most anilmals in my experience see us humans as a threat. What a sad thing.
Here we are, alive and aware in a wildly improbable and amazingly well balanced dynamic equilibrium,
and we are doing our damndest to destroy it.
I wish I lived in a world where an albatross could land upon my shoulder.
Most humans cannot even conceive of Deep Time, let alone experience it in any way. I caught a glimpse while in an altered state of consciousness, combined with lots of meditation, and it was incredible. Unfortunately, it’s also pretty much indescribable.
My very first meditative experience (I was unaware of meditation at the young age at which it occurred) came when I was tending the circle garden I’d planted with my mother (RIP) after a hurricane blew away our wading pool. Most of the garden was bulbs, and while watering one morning, I noticed that a purple iris would bloom that day. After I finished my chores, I parked myself next to the iris, and attempted to slow myself down so I could watch it bloom. I spent all day with the plant, and by the time I left, it had fully flowered.
We could learn a lot from the albatross, if it’s around long enough to investigate. Health and peace.
I’ve always like the Australian Aborigine term “The Dream Time.” This from people who’ve inhabited the place for what – 80,000 years, and that’s just a dust mote in time?
Soaring for days on end would be good fun if I could eat beef instead of sushi. Been interested in the albatross since I first struggled through the rime of the ancient mariner.
Thank You WC! I have always wanted to see an albatross real live. We’re supposed to have a couple which range our way some but have never seen them.
This one is about the same size as a bald eagle female?
Supposed to be magnificent in flight…
Hoping the damage done by humans is stopped- what a waste . What a frickin waste.