Now—even if it didn’t make them any easier to catch in flight—he could at least begin to tell them apart.
Nearly all of the birds were tube-nosed, with bills that contained salt-excreting glands, so that didn’t help much. Nor did their color scheme, which was almost unrelievedly black and white. But the different species did exhibit unique flight patterns and telltale feeding methods, and that made the job a bit easier.
The diving petrels, for instance, were small and chubby, and shot above the sea with fast-beating wings, punctuated by short glides; often they went right through the crest of a wave, before plunging down to capture a bit of krill.
The pintado petrels danced with their webbed feet across the top of the water itself.
The southern fulmars, gunmetal gray, would allow themselves to stall in the wind, then fold their feet and drop, head last, into the sea, like a scaredy-cat jumping off a high dive.
The Antarctic prions plowed through the surf using their broad, laminated bills like shovels, filtering plankton from the water. Their cousins—the narrow-billed prions—flew more languidly, leaning down to pluck nimbly the occasional prey from the top few centimeters of the sea.
The snowy white petrels—the hardest to see against the foam and spray of the turbulent ocean—caromed around like pinballs, darting this way and that, their sharp little wings even touching the icy water to gauge the shape and drift of the swells.
But the king of them all—soaring on high like a ruler calmly surveying his realm—was the wandering albatross, the largest of all the seabirds. Even as Michael rooted around in his waterproof supply bag for a new lens, one of them had roosted on the helicopter tarp on the lower deck, and several more were keeping time with the ship, flying at the height of the bridge. Michael had never seen any creature travel with such beauty and economy of motion. With a wingspan of over three meters, the ashy white birds—with bright pink beaks and blackened brows—barely seemed to exert themselves at all. Their wings, Michael had learned, were a miracle of aerodynamic design, feeling every tiny shift in the wind and instantly adjusting an entire suite of muscles to alter the angle and sweep of each individual feather. The bones themselves weighed almost nothing, as they were partially filled with air. Apart from the brief spells when an albatross might alight to nest or mate on an Antarctic island, the bird lived its whole life in the air, borrowing the power of the changeable winds and using it, through some prodigious feat of navigation, to circle the entire globe, again and again.
No wonder sailors had always revered them and, as Captain Purcell later explained over dinner one night, “regarded them as a symbol of good luck. Those birds have a better global navigational system in their heads than we’ve got in the wheelhouse.”
“I had a few of them keeping me company today,” Michael said, “while I was up on the flying bridge.”
Purcell nodded as he reached for the bottle of sparkling cider. “They can adjust their dip and their speed to the velocity of the ship they’re following.”
He refilled Dr. Barnes’s glass with the cider. As Michael had learned on his first night aboard, when he’d innocently asked for a beer, no alcohol was allowed on U.S. Navy or Coast Guard ships.
“A friend of mine, a Tulane ornithologist,” said Hirsch, “radio-tagged an albatross in the Indian Ocean and tracked it by satellite for one month. It had traveled over fifteen thousand kilometers on a single foraging expedition. Apparently, the bird can see, from hundreds of meters up, the bioluminescent schools of squid. When the squid come up to the surface to feed, the bird goes down.”
Charlotte, taking one of the serving bowls from its rubber pad, paused and said, “This isn’t calamari, is it?” and everyone laughed. “I mean, I’d hate to deprive some hungry albatross.”
“No, that’s one of our cook’s specialties—fried zucchini strips.”
Charlotte helped herself, then passed it to the Operations officer—Ops, for short—Lieutenant Kathleen Healey.
“We serve lots of fresh vegetables and fruit on the way out,” Captain Purcell observed, “and lots of canned and frozen on the long way back.”
The ship suddenly swerved, as if taking a step sideways, then swerved back again. Michael put one hand on the rubber strip that went all the way around the rim of the table and the other on his cider glass. He still hadn’t gotten used to the ship’s constant rolling.
“The ship is shaped sort of like a football,” Kathleen said, looking utterly unperturbed by the turbulence. “In fact, she’s not really designed for calm seas; she hasn’t even got a keel. She’s designed to move smoothly through brash ice and bergs, and that’s when you’ll be glad you’re on her.”