Albatross on a par with best of birdies
DESPAIRING golfers forgoing birdies and eagles with the cancellation of this week’s British Open should pick up binoculars to get their thrills.
The cheers from celebrating a hole-in-one or a 500-yard drive off the tee can easily be reprised by the joy of coming face to face with a bird of mythical status.
Golfers began using the term “albatross” in the 1930s when looking for a superlative term to describe the rarest of rare golf shots.
Birdie had been coined decades earlier for being one under par and was followed by the eagle to describe being two under.when a few lucky players found themselves three shots to the good at a hole, they needed a fitting avian analogy. What better choice than an albatross.
To illustrate the jubilation of achieving an albatross, we only need to see how events have been unfolding at one of the nation’s best known bird reserves of late.
A couple of fortunate birders were left celebrating as if they had lifted the famous Claret Jug themselves last week when they visited the RSPB’S famous Bempton Cliffs to take in the grandeur of England’s greatest seabird colony. Up to a half-million gannets, guillemots, razorbills, fulmars, kittiwakes, puffins and other seabirds cram on its compact chalk ledges looking out at the North Sea.
Chris Packham famously described the East Yorkshire watchpoint as the “Nou Camp of the bird world” in honour of Barcelona FC’S football arena, but perhaps the 18th green gallery at St Andrews on the final day of the Open may be a more fitting comparison, especially if adding the sighting of an albatross into a round of birdwatching. Imagine the scenes when the two lucky birders were graced with the appearance of a black-browed albatross floating on its huge pinions just beyond the recommended two-metre gap for social distancing.
Such close proximity allowed the birders to savour both the enormity and beauty of this exceedingly rare visitor to northern waters, with its seven-foot wingspan, charcoal-toned upper parts and snowy-white face adorned with a stout, pink bill and eyes looking as if the mascara has run for some melancholic reason.
Looking forlorn is a fitting emotion for any black-browed albatross that finds itself in the northern hemisphere.these birds are the masters of southern seas but those crossing the doldrums to reach the Atlantic’s upper latitudes are left to ride the waves looking for love. It was the story of a previous albatross called Albert and his annual visit to Shetland to find a mate that helped me get a job with Express Newspapers in the 1980s.
Legendary editor Brian Hitchen was so taken with my account of Albert’s plight that he offered me a job on the spot to track him down.
Albert remained elusive but a few years later I had a rather one-sided tete-a-tete with this magnificent species on the Falklands. Having teamed up with John Craven and the Countryfile team, we travelled to their remote breeding colony onwest Point Island to see the measures being undertaken by the Albatross Task Force to prevent their dreadful deaths on the baited hooks of “long-line” fishing fleets.
The joy of seeing one of these wonderful birds with the hope that it will survive for decades to come was as sweet as a hole-in-one.
‘A beautiful and very rare visitor’