EYE OF THE ALBATROSS, Visions of Hope and Survival

By Carl Safina , Henry Holt & Co., 416 pages

Reviewed by Gail Goldberger

"Almost everything about albatrosses is superlative and extreme," writes Carl Safina in his prelude to Eye of the Albatross. One could say the same thing about this book.

Eye of the Albatross is an ambitious book that covers a lot of territory with a rare grace of language, metaphor and fact. Safina, the former director of National Audubon's Living Oceans Program, and author of the Seafood Lover's Almanac and Song for the Blue Ocean, uses his main interest — the world's oceans — as a backdrop for his heroine: one female Laysan albatross he names Amelia.

With a group of field biologists and volunteers, he spends five months on one of the Hawaiian archipelago's remotest islands, studying albatross by taping satellite tracking transmitters on their back feathers.

We fly with Amelia through the author's eyes, and he traces for us, with illustrated maps and beautiful prose, her travels to find food for her chick, and then for herself. The maps are real, made directly from transmitter data. His reportage is conjecture, but Safina is so good at this you forget he isn't really the bird. It's believable, as long as you understand what he's doing, and he's doing this to forge empathy for the bird.

"What to us is a trackless blue ocean is to her recognizable territory, a familiar mosaic riddled with scents and signs. As we know that in our town the supermarket will hold food, a train will come along the tracks, children will fill the schoolyard, and a bus will appear at the stop, she likewise knows the sea's vast and changing neighborhoods, and what to expect. She knows when to keep going, and where patience will turn to profit."

The book is chock full of fascinating facts. "Wandering and Royal albatrosses wield the longest wings in nature — over eleven feet tip to tip. These creatures are gliding machines. The ratio of wingspan to wing width of a Wandering albatross is 18 to 1, similar to the best-perfected human-made gliders."

"Gliding-adapted to a fault," with wing locks at their shoulders and elbows for rigidity, they have less muscle mass than most birds and cannot sustain flapping flight. Instead, with locked wings "like open switchblades," they make maximum use of and are utterly reliant on... wind.

And so they have evolved in our windiest places — our oceans — which have an abundant supply of moving air. Albatross spend 95% of their time at sea, most of it in the air. In one year, they cover distances equal to circumventing the Earth three times round at the equator. "A fifty-year old albatross has flown, at minimum, 3.7 million miles."

Safina follows the breeding cycle of one chick's parent, Amelia, to illustrate these birds' unusual powers of flight and dedication to progeny. When Amelia is on the nest, her mate makes the foraging runs to feed Amelia. When dad is nest bound, Amelia makes them, coursing from the tropical nursery of the Pacific Ocean to the sub polar Gulf of Alaska and Bering Seas, covering 2-3,000 miles on a single foraging run.

"Most birds have a poor sense of smell, but the tube-nosed birds carry olfactory equipment that's among the most sensitive ever evolved. Amelia is sifting scent as she goes, so she sticks near the ocean surface like a seagoing bloodhound. And the sky is not empty of life. Terns and frigatebirds occasionally cross her line of vision. She reads them skillfully... they have found a source of fish... and are worth following."

With external tubular nostrils, her sense of smell is so good she can hunt in the dark. "In the starlit black waters of a moonless night, she sees lanternfish flickering to each other, blinking the lights along their bodies like scouts with signaling mirrors. They're generally too small for Amelia to catch, but she knows patience here now could mean squid — squid in the dark that have followed the lanternfish up a thousand feet since sunset."

Like any good naturalist, Safina widens his scope to include other wildlife that share Amelia's environs. There are tiger sharks in turquoise lagoons, monk seals and turtles on islands like hers, and many stories of fish and fishing, as Safina climbs onto boats trolling the same seas as seabirds.

While the estimated 14,000 seabirds killed annually by long-line fishing is nothing compared to the numbers claimed by man's long history of inhumanity to birds, it is nothing to sneeze at either. Safina rightly profiles one commercial fisher, Mark Lundsten, who has found an economical and simple solution to albatross mortality.

If only his method of weights and streamers would be taken up by all fishers.

In the end, the albatross persist, among islands and waters awash with our waste, swallowing golf tees and toothbrushes along with squid and fish guts. There is sadness and death here too. The year the study team alights on Tern Island is the hottest El Nino year in history. Global warming turns the weather crazy. First the sun scorches, causing some parents to leave their chicks unattended. Then, the island is inundated by heavy, persistent rain. Two days and two nights of rain cause the island to flood, drowning thousands of birds, nests and chicks.

For those of us who write about nature, Carl Safina nails what we are all trying to do: convey that everything on this planet, and the planet itself, is a living, breathing, dynamic organism with intelligence and vitality that should be studied, understood, supported, respected in its own right, and protected. All life is connected. Our thoughtless plastic discards choke and kill unknowing seabird chicks who are just trying to stay alive.

That Safina strives to understand seabirds so thoroughly, and communicate his understanding with such wonderment, is what I find truly compelling about this book. Safina's quest is not only to shrink our unfamiliarity with an extraordinary bird, but also our estrangement from "our extended family" of non-humans. He does this by wedding fact to reverence, making it impossible not to feel great compassion for these birds whose lives are full of risk, reward, perseverance, success and failure, just like ours. We cannot feel superior to Amelia as we read about her. Her wits, her tenacity, her endurance, her strength, are no less than our own.

Though at times I was bogged down by the breadth of his undertaking, Safina's book is an engaging compendium of stories about life at the edge of the sea, and the resilience of life despite our continuing harm.

If you are an aficionado of birds, ocean life, epic stories of peril and survival, beautiful prose and would enjoy an exhilarating look into the life of one albatross, this is a great book for you. Pull up a chair, and be prepared for quite a journey.