A soothing sight of ease and loveliness
GO to allaboutbirds.org, select livecams and click on Northern Royal Albatross.
If, only 30 years ago, I had submitted the above sentence to this newspaper the subeditor would quietly have shown it to another subeditor, they would have agreed that no further discussion was necessary, one of them would have picked up the phone and half an hour later I would have heard a knock at the door.
Opening it I would have found a large gentleman who spoke in a calm voice and who suggested it would be to everyone’s benefit if I just came along quietly, though if necessary . . . and here he would have gestured to the two equally large gentlemen standing behind him, one of whom was carrying an unusuallooking jacket with a series of stout leather buckles up the spine.
All of which suggests that in some ways the world changes faster than we think. But at the same time, if you do what I suggest in that opening sentence, you will be reminded that it remains the same as ever it was.
The website will take you to Taiaroa Head on the Otago Peninsula and in the centre of the screen you’ll see an albatross chick just a few weeks old. The chick sits on its nest doing nothing but waiting to be old enough to fly. That moment is emphatically worth waiting for, but it is months away yet.
At present you could just walk up and wring the chick’s neck. (And indeed people do sometimes walk up to the chick, but they are volunteers with good intentions and they are there only to weigh it, to check on its health.)
The chick’s parents are rarely there, being out at sea collecting krill and squid. The chick shows no signs of worry. It just waits, its down ruffled by the constant wind. It swivels its head. It preens its flanks with its bill. It sleeps. When rain and gales come, it sits low in the nest and endures. It is the pattern of all patience.
When a parent lands it does so clumsily, illsuited to the givelessness of earth after days upon the yielding, flexing cushion of the air. Having landed and found its offspring unharmed the bird makes a call of seeming celebration, throwing back its head and honking like a goose. It feeds the chick by regurgitation, and sits beside it a while, its face impassive. Then at some arbitrary moment, in a movement of such ease and loveliness it makes you gasp, the adult bird unfolds its wings and simply steps on to the air. It tilts and arcs and swoops and it is out of shot and gone away to sea. The chick resumes its waiting.
The nest is on a cliff top. Beyond it is just air, where there are often other albatrosses wheeling, each wingspan wonderful, a blackish crescent metres long, an aeroblade a thousand times more subtle and exquisite and responsive to the variable world than anything the hand of man has ever made.
Visible beyond the birds is the far side of the inlet and the town of Aramoana where some years ago a man went mad and hunted his own species with a semiautomatic rifle. They shot him dead.
Further to the west you can make out the cranes and wharves of Port Chalmers. Every so often a cargo ship steers out between the heads. Further west still and just out of shot lies the city of Dunedin, now clamped down in a bid to thwart a modern plague.
None of this impinges on the chick.
It sits as chicks have sat for millennia, waiting to take to the air and feed and mate and rear chicks of its own. I look in on it almost every day. It pleases me to observe its simple trust in things, its fitness for the world, its mute beauty.
In a column just last month, and apropos of something else, I quoted the final stanza of Auden’s apocalyptic The Fall of Rome:
Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss, Silently and very fast.
But whenever I view the albatross chick it’s the preceding stanza that now comes most readily to mind.
Unendowed with wealth or pity, Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs, Eye each fluinfected city.
He was good, Auden. Someone else to reread during the lockdown.
Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.