Sad wanderer looking for love
The wanderer has returned. A year after delighting visitors at one of the nation’s most famous sea bird sanctuaries, a mighty albatross has materialised on our shores.
Black-browed albatrosses are the waveriders of the southern seas. Wings stretching seven feet tip-to-tip allow them to sail over tempestuous waters with a majesty that has earned them the adoration of mariners through the ages.
By a quirk of fate, once in a generation a solitary bird slips across the Atlantic and arrives in northern waters to the delight of countless birdwatchers.
In a near identical repeat of last year’s magical appearance, birdwatchers visiting the RSPB’s famous Bempton Cliffs reserve on the East Yorkshire coast recently spotted another black-browed albatross sharing the same airspace as the nesting gannets, fulmars, kittiwakes and puffins.
Where the albatross had spent the intervening months is open to speculation but it is likely to be the same bird that has been drifting the North Sea coastline of Germany since 2014 in a forlorn hope of finding a mate.
The chances of another albatross of the opposite sex making the same venture from the Southern Hemisphere are remote but, looking through the archives, there have been similar stories of these lovelorn birds around our shores.
Through the late 1960s until 1995, a singleton cruised the seas and skirted the rocky headlands of Scotland looking for a partner without joy. Such was its fame, the bird was dubbed Albert Ross by a procession of birdwatchers who travelled to the northernmost tip of the Shetlands for a sighting. In truth, Albert was a female!
For my own encounter, I had to undertake a journey as epic as an albatross flight of fancy. In 2006, I teamed up with John Craven and the Countryfile team on the Falkland Islands to see the measures being undertaken by the Albatross Task Force to prevent the birds’ dreadful deaths on the baited hooks of long-line fishing fleets.
Memories of these breathtaking birds gliding past our small boat will live with me forever.
By a quirk of fate, once in a generation an Albatross arrives here