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Wisdom sits on its egg in January. She shares hatching duties with longtime partner Akekamai and spends her free time catching squid and fishing in the sea. Photo: John Brack/USFWS
The Laysan albatross, the oldest known wild bird on Earth, is an international icon still incubating. This year she gave birth to her 39th chick.
One autumn afternoon in the mid-20th century, the black-backed albatross returned to Midway Atoll to nest on the sand and nest to incubate their one-year-old eggs. A firm believer in “nest loyalty,” the albatross has spent much of her adult life making the same journeys, a job done for countless generations of albatrosses before her. Every year, millions of seabirds return to this tiny island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean to breed. Over the centuries, generations of observers of these seabirds have given them countless names: moths, a reference to the tattoo needles the Hawaiians once made from bird bones; albatross, derived from the Arabic word for “divers”; Laysan, in honor of The smaller neighboring island, in turn, was named after the Russian explorer’s ship.
Thousands of people who lived on Midway after World War II may have called this mid-century albatross “stooge”. The nickname is a collective nickname for the crowd of albatrosses that stumble over the Midway Naval Air Station, the barracks, and the Gooneyville hut. But let’s fast forward from this nameless beast and zoom in on her egg, because inside that shell lies the history of the albatross that stretches into the next millennium.
The egg will literally hatch, and the bird inside will spend its life as it should be: 90% of the time at sea, flying back to the same square of sand, hatching together with its old assistant Egg for no more than a year. then she will continue to return to Midway, having covered at least 3 million miles. For 65 years, she will lay more than three dozen eggs. In doing so, Albatross will meet a group of people eager to look after her: naturalists, photographers, volunteers and, ultimately, superfans.
When humanity learns that the bird has reached its sixth decade, it will receive its own name. Not mouli or impudence, but wisdom: a global symbol of nature’s resilience and the hard-earned wisdom of seabirds. Her longevity would have made her a children’s book star, a bag icon, and the subject of countless joyful news stories. With wisdom, the inhabitants of this mid-century albatross egg will be the oldest wild bird on earth—at least as far as people know.
This winter, Wisdom flew back to Midway to build a nest for her 39th egg. Not bad for a mother who turns 70 this year, as well as baby boomers Bootsy Collins and Charo – although the latter is said to be older than she admits. As in the case of Charo, it is difficult to determine the age of Wisdom, it is better to say that Albatross is at least 70 years old.
She was first tagged by the legendary naturalist Chandler Robbins in 1956, who found her incubating her egg in his lair. Laysan albatrosses do not nest until she is 5 years old, so her last possible hatching year is 1951. But since some birds don’t incubate until they’re 10 years old, and we don’t know if Robbins spotted her on her first egg, Wisdom is certainly a more advanced septuagenarian, with Stevie Wonder (1950) or Vera Wang. (1949) or even Iggy Pop (1947) sharing an incubation year.
Wisdom may have been born in 1948, as was Jenny Johnson, who moved with her family to Midway Naval Station when she was in fifth grade. Johnson’s father was a harbor keeper from 1958 to 1960, and she attended a small school where she competed in square dance and brandished a baton at the Independence Day parade. The backdrop to her childhood was the enchanting avifauna of Midway, home to over 20 species of seabirds, including red-tailed tropicbirds, black terns and three species of albatross. “It’s a great place for a 10-year-old—at least for a kid like me,” Johnson said. “I can play with birds around my house and everywhere I go.” While at Midway, Johnson took care of abandoned Laysan chicks and white “fairy” terns with a pair nesting near her home, Laysan became friends. These years have given Johnson an affinity for the winged inhabitants of Midway, an affinity that extends far beyond her youth.
The albatross’ youth ends with its first long journey to learn how to forage in open water. The juvenile birds then return to Midway not to breed, but to practice dancing. Courting albatrosses requires mastery of vocals and full-body choreography, and Laysan hone this by walking around the island in small groups and couples. American Bandstand premieres, as well as Wisdom will attend their own dance with mōlī socks. As human teenagers from Midway to the Midwest teach each other how to walk, Wisdom impresses her peers with bows, turns and pecks. But Laysan’s mating dance is more complicated than any hare jump, gestures are faster than hand-hop, and even more diverse than Madison’s. Early risers dance for years, reviewing their dance cards and refining their poses, eventually mirroring the poses of the only partner they can work with for a lifetime.
Imagine Wisdom rocking her dance as Tutti Frutti chimes through the windows of a bachelor barracks near Midway. It stretches its neck and beak into a tall mouli column, then extends its snow-white head under its wings and strokes it like a typical albatross. Without taking her eyes off her partner in a gray frame, she sticks her head out, slaps her beak in syncopation and ends with the characteristic growl of an albatross: wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow
After Wisdom’s early dancing days were over, she had a second group in 1962 and reformed four times in the following decades. These markers do not have a single number because bird counting methods have changed over time. In addition, unlike the cold-resistant stainless steel cuffs used today, the straps were made of aluminum, a metal that easily rots when fastened to the leg of a moving bird.
Many of Wisdom’s countrymen with similar gangs lost them at sea and flew back to Midway naked as seabirds, so elusive. Keeping a close eye on the bird for decades has proven challenging when data can flow through so many holes. This is one of the reasons we don’t know how many other laysan in Midway are as old as Wisdom. Some may even be older. There may be dozens of other nests on an island, even hundreds! —— On it sits an albatross of golden virginity. Only in this century did we widely use data systems that made it possible to determine the age of Laysan.
Because people don’t know anything about a particular bird whose intelligence ranges from 20 to 50 years old, we also can’t tell if its mate has been the same albatross all these years. Given Wisdom’s longevity, it’s unlikely that her partner in 1956 was the same bird as her current partner, the albatross, which the US Fish and Wildlife Service began monitoring in 2006. Presumably sometime in the last half century, a new single, Wisdom, has returned to the Midway dance floor to play albatrosses, Laysan electric slides, or (imprudently) Gooneybird macarenas. Whatever the dance, he led her to the bird, which was now wearing an armband with the number G000. For ten years, he was known by the people of Midway as Gu or Mister Gu, until an open competition in 2016 renamed him the more classic Akeakamai: Hawaiian, which means “lover of wisdom.”
Each year, Wisdom builds a nest with an albatross, formerly known as Goo, which lands at a specified location and begins to slowly circle the sand. Her flat feet trampled a shallow hole, which she reinforced with twigs and fallen leaves. A few days after the lair is filled with pre-determined contents, Akekamai will come to pick her up so she can fly a thousand miles, fill her stomach with squid, and return to stay vigilant for a few more weeks. For every season she’s had in the last 29 years, someone has stopped at the nest and counted them with a click.
The first census of albatross nests at Midway began in 1992, after researchers suggested that the longline fishing method — dragging hooks and baited hooks behind boats — seriously affected albatross mortality. (U.S. regulations have since governed U.S. fishing practices, but no international agreement has been reached to reduce risks for longline birds.) Beth Flint, a wildlife biologist with the FWS Pacific National Marine Sanctuary, said. This motivation has led to what Flint calls “almost no parallel streams of species data” of the largest albatross colony on Earth.
“In a way, albatrosses are easy to count,” Flint said. “You don’t have to find them, they sit there very politely as you walk by.” The difficulty is how densely they cover the island: about half a million nests are located about twice as large as Central Park. During the peak nesting season, teams of trained volunteers scour every inch of Midway Atoll for several weeks, walking over 6 miles a day on pedometers, with breaks only around Christmas and New Year’s. Earl’s loyal volunteers “come from all walks of life, from university professors to bike messengers,” Flint said.
The list of Nest Census alumni also includes writer Helen MacDonald, author of H Is for Hawk. She took part in the 2018 tally, noting in her statement that she “reads the body language of birds very well.” It turned out to be a minor skill, mostly used in her spare time, when she cycled to a remote place and sat in thousands of dens. “It’s an incredible sight,” she said. “When it rains, they all raise their mouths to drink. When the wind blows, they spread their wings and soar a little in the air.”
Wisdom took off when MacDonald appeared. Other nest counters are buzzing about when—or, God forbid, if—the six might be back. When she finally showed up, Wisdom made the same choreographic shift MacDonald had seen in other birds: the “fierce negotiation” of mating pairs that switched places at the top of the nest. “They have difficult discussions, call each other,” she said. Wisdom can, like many birds, be repulsed by its mates after a long vigil in the nest. Or she may react, as some of the birds MacDonald has observed, “jump off the egg and say, ‘I can’t take it anymore!’ Oh my god, I can’t wait to get back to the sea!”
In the Earl’s early days, Wisdom’s Lair was painted with peat paint by a volunteer who surveyed the island. But after a rodent eradication program helped bonin petrels bounce back, census takers had to limit their steps to avoid trampling down ground nest dwellings. The volunteers changed their approach and began to line up in what McDonald called “something like Top Gun”.
Wearing large hats and sunglasses, counting clickers in each hand, they counted all the nests between themselves and their closest colleagues. Necessity also led to the invention of the Midway Counting Shoe, a plywood tape attached to the sole of a running shoe to further cushion steps. “You have to learn how to use the new muscles,” McDonald explained, “because you basically walk around like an astronaut all day.”
The Midway Astronaut Shoes were also worn by Wisdom’s neighbor Jenny Johnson in the 1950s. She and her husband Richard volunteered for the first count 21 years ago and have been returning to the atoll almost every year since. Johnson was amazed by what she saw in the fields of the former home – the intricacies of observing the communication of generations of birds: “I mean, every square foot of this island is covered with albatrosses,” she explained. “Nesting albatrosses, walking albatrosses. Albatrosses dance, fight and talk with their eggs. If you do the math, the noise level is unbelievable.”
Or the first 15 years of the nest census, when wisdom was just click counting—another smoky-eyed face in the crowd. A new era of visibility began in 2002 when Robbins returned to Midway to “re-visit” previously noted albatrosses. For the third time in his long life, Robbins, then aged 83, called himself Wisdom. Returning to his home at the USGS Bird Laboratory in Maryland (the office where Robbins worked until his death four years ago at age 98), he traced the group’s five decades of existence on a paper trail. It was then that Robbins realized that he had seen the bird for the first time during the Eisenhower administration.
Robbins wrote a letter to John Clavitter, a wildlife biologist at the new FWS Midway Sanctuary, as the bird’s revised age sets a new precedent for Laysan’s lifespan. Kravert really wanted to see the bird live, but got into a quandary: “We don’t know where it is.” Robbins’ map indicated its approximate location: a yard the size of a football field. Up to 2000 nests are easily placed on the area, each of which is occupied not by one bird, but by an alternating pair. Also, service bands are not easy to find on perched birds. In a few more years, the most advanced albatross will remain incognito.
Kravitt then read about the grandmother of the northern royal albatross, which became a national treasure after nesting every two years at Cape Tayaroa in New Zealand from 1938 to 1989 and hatching its last chick at about the age of 62. He thought about the old woman Laysan on his island and imagined that her legacy reflected in the eyes of the public the legacy of his grandmother.
This is how the quest for wisdom is gaining momentum. Kravet’s team searched throughout the breeding season in 2005 and again in 2006 when Waldo’s epic albatross finally paid off.
The bird’s proper name refers to the stainless steel strap on Cravette’s left leg and the PVC strap on the right leg – cherry red, readable from a distance. “We didn’t have a game or anything, it just came to me,” he said. Wisdom. With that, Kravet “started stalking her, and then we started talking about Wisdom in press releases. That’s where she came from.” The Wisdom saga quickly gained fans all over the world. Every year she builds another nest (in the last 15 years she has almost done it), and the first sightings of her eggs make headlines: “Wisdom shocks scientists”, “Albatross won’t stop laying eggs”, “Real old bird and chicken.”
The 2011 rumble was the fourth largest earthquake on record and generated a 130-foot tsunami that was moving at 435 miles per hour.
Five years after Wisdom’s new life as the face of Midway, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the coast of Japan sent a tsunami to the atoll. A series of waves, the largest of which is five feet high, made landfall overnight, covering 60 percent of East Midway Island. Wisdom’s Lair is located on a sandy island and is only 20% flooded, with no damage reaching either her lair or the barracks of the nearby Midway Human Shelter. She was probably on the hunt when the waves hit, her new chick was waiting for her on the still dry ground.
More than a week after the tsunami, staff and volunteers rescued chickens buried in the sand. They rescued adults stuck in debris and fished out submerged albatrosses from the lagoon. Ten days later, when she was finally spotted on the island to feed her chickens, NPR and the BBC ran a press release saying “Wisdom found!”
This is not Wisdom’s first tsunami, and certainly not the only threat to her survival. Plastic was just a part of the global economy when Wisdom was born, and now it washes away the coasts of Midway, other Pacific atolls and the Hawaiian Islands by the hundreds of tons every year. About 98 percent of albatross chicks born on Midway feed on plastic ocean debris before they become adults. But climate change will have an even greater impact, as the vast majority of the planet’s black-backed albatrosses breed on low-lying islands, which are bound to change due to rising sea levels and increased wave action. What’s more, young birds are at risk of dehydration on hot summer days, and weakening winds will make take-offs from Midway even more dangerous.
A new threat emerged at Midway in 2015 when census takers noticed that rats had begun feeding on nesting albatrosses. In 2016, rat raids destroyed about 1,000 abandoned nests, and 250 adults who stubbornly continued to incubate their eggs were bitten to death. Within a year, the attack had spread throughout the atoll. Wisdom, of course, is closely monitored by a special security camera, and a booth with rodenticide pills has been set up next to her lair. “More than 50 people live on Midway. Everyone knows where she is,” Matt Brown of FWS assured Audubon in 2018. A long-term tiered plan to eradicate rats will begin next year.
Photographer and field biologist Naomi Blinick extended her stay at Midway after the 2017 count, contributing to earlier rat eradication efforts. She walked through the nests of seabirds, manually threw the bait and examined the birds to map the infestation. She was about to replenish her supply of decoys when she first passed the throne of Dame Midway herself. Around Valentine’s Day, when countless Wisdom chicks hatch, Blinick borrows his experience and long lenses to photograph newborns. Like concertgoers at an outdoor music festival, she looked for a rare spot on the lawn of Camp Bravo “without getting in the way of other people’s wings.”
As thousands of animals around her silently sat on their eggs, so Pancake watched Wisdom for three days in a row. “For a long time I did nothing but stare at the bird,” Blinick said. Wisdom is also not very fond of cameras. According to Blinick, she was much tougher than the restless ones nesting around her, “she would stand up for, like, a second and then turn her back on me,” Blinick said. “And in an hour she will be moving again!” She compares Wisdom’s cool, status-minded demeanor to that of another 70-year-old diva: Anna Wintour.
Following paparazzi surveillance, Blinick volunteered to stay on the island to tidy up his extensive photo archive. She then extended her stay further. Blinick has found a mate on Midway: a biologist at Mag Doure’s hideout. “I can’t think of my birding experience on this magical island without the thought of meeting my own amazing friends,” said Blinick, finding his own way to shine for each other. On an epic Midway karaoke night, just before they flew off together, they grabbed a microphone and turned to each other like two dancing albatrosses, singing a love song that is the ultimate refuge. Human song: “Island in the stream.”
He first saw this breeding season at the end of November when she was spotted on top of what may have been her 39th egg. FWS public relations officer Megan Nagel wrote a press release announcing the return of the bird to Midway, which she called an increase in enthusiasm. “I think at the end of 2020 we are all looking for something to look forward to,” Nagel said, “guarantees. Like, the sun will rise, the sun will set, and wisdom will return to Midway Atoll. Amazing hope – especially this year.”
The island’s albatrosses haven’t changed much since last breeding season, but human life has changed a lot. COVID-19 has delayed research projects. Newcomers to Midway were quarantined for two weeks in cramped dormitories. The annual den census leaves only the most experienced enumerator staff. This small group includes Richard and Jenny Johnson, who withdrew from the census because of this revised number. Wisdom is not the only seventy-year-old hard at work in Midway this winter.
To ensure the survival of reconnaissance and other seabirds, we need international cooperation. The Albatross and Petrel Conservation Agreement coordinates and promotes the protection of these birds, but the US has not yet signed it. Urge your MPs to take action: audubon.org/acap.
With their team reduced by a dozen or so, the Johnsons found the job more difficult. Jenny Johnson told herself that the soreness of her body was “the kind of pain that is caused by good intentions. So it’s less pain.” The lack of staff means the couple is spending more time at Midway this season, allowing them to see a new milestone in the albatross life cycle. The first chick of the year, a black-footed albatross, hatched in mid-January and was seen by Jenny Johnson for the first time in her nest census career. Later that month, she also found the Laysan incubator.
But Johnson didn’t say goodbye face-to-face with her albatross peers at the end of the final tally. Like many who care about Wisdom and her large community, Johnson has largely distanced herself from her. “We worked hard not to disturb her,” she said. “The area she is in is semi-secure and very few need to get past her. She chose a good place.”
Just a few days later in 2021, Wisdom returned from another big feeding trip and took over the Akeakamai spot for her new egg. Someone set up a 360-degree camera near her nest so fans can check it out via Wisdom, and the video captures not only her, but a carpet of albatrosses in every direction. The air was full of seabirds, but for her, Wisdom was silent. The morning sun shone on her cheeks, and she narrowed her eyes slightly. We can see two non-breeding laysan swaying, mooing and clicking behind her. But what we don’t see is people walking cautiously around Wisdom Island in their strange slippers, clicking their hand counters every time they spot a lair like hers. And since the cameras weren’t focused on her lair on February 1st, we also didn’t get to see the moment her new egg hatched.
Midway census takers counted almost 500,000 nests this year. This number is almost one and a half million individuals – one in the nest, one on the wing, one in the egg, one for each house in the sand. It’s a million minds and humanity is still counting.
This story originally appeared in the Spring 2021 issue titled The Midway Lady. To get our print magazine, donate now to become a member.
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