The Albatross is beloved by poets and mariners alike. But according to the experts, most species of these ocean wanderers are in danger of extinction.
It’s claimed a hundred thousand are needlessly killed every year. One man, a future king , has taken up the challenge to try and stop them being wiped out:
Prince of Wales: What we’re doing to the Albatross is just a mere symbol of the appalling horrors that are going on out of sight and out of mind…
Barcelona, Spain. Every four years the fastest ocean going yachts compete in the ultimate sailing race around the world. They will travel nearly 60,000 km circumnavigating the globe. They’ll follow the route of the multi-masted clipper ships of old, through the Roaring Forties of the Southern Ocean, riding thirty metre waves, and driven by wind speeds of a hundred and ten kilometres an hour.
They’re off! These crewmen are likely to encounter far fewer albatrosses than any of their predecessors. It’s why they’ve taken up the cause in a race to save the albatross.
The Crozet Islands are at latitude 46 in the Southern Indian Ocean, closer to Antarctica than southern Africa. They are a haven for the largest albatrosses - the Wandering Albatross, with their 3.5 metre wing span. Although Henri Weimerskirch lives in France, he’s spent years studying Albatrosses here on the Crozet Islands in the southern Indian Ocean.
Henri Weimerskirch, Centre for Biological Studies, Chizé, France: These birds are Oceanic birds, they spend about ninety five per cent of there lives at sea. They are in the open ocean foraging for food. During a single breeding season, they would cover between 100,000 km and 150,000 kilometres. This means during the lives because they spend their whole lives at sea they cover millions of kilometres.
Anyone who travels through the Roaring Forties soon meets the Wandering Albatross.
Prince of Wales: I just remember being in the Navy, when I was serving back in the 70s, and the long journeys I did in the ships I served in - how often we’d see the albatross ceaselessly going round and around the ship or just following in our wake. I remember again, with fascination, watching these marvellous birds, and just imagining how far they would travel and the fact they were always there in the morning was the thing that I could never get over.
Ben Sullivan, of BirdLife International, has amassed the data describing the fate of the albatrosses.
Ben Sullivan, BirdLife International: There are 21 species of Albatross in the world, and nineteen of those are classified as being under threat of extinction under the IUCN Red List. To give you a few examples, the Wandering Albatross population in South Georgia - in the mid ‘60s, there were around two thousand breeding pairs breeding on bird island, and now for the first time that population went down below nine hundred breeding pairs. The Black Browed Albatross in South Georgia are declining at around three to four percent a year. So there are many of these species that are declining at the rate that is clearly unsustainable.
But how do these experts know they are in decline?
Ben Sullivan: For many of these species there are monitoring programmes every three, four or five years - so you have your base line data, and then obviously you can calculate the decline between these census periods. So there can be several years time lag before some of the declines are detected.
It’s not just around the Crozet Islands that detailed studies have documented the decline of the albatross. Here in the Falkland Islands, where the Black-browed albatross breeds, they’ve noticed a similar decline.
Sarah Crofts, Ornithologist: In the last decade the rate of decline for the Black Browed albatross in the Falkland Islands is about one per cent per year. That equates to around eight thousand birds per year, or twenty a day killed.
Among the first to think there might be something wrong with the albatrosses was Henri Weimerskirch.
Henri Weimerskirch: We first documented the fact that some populations like Wandering Albatrosses were decreasing. But we had no idea why the population was decreasing at this time. This was in the Eighties… So we were the first to use satellite tracking to track Wandering Albatrosses, and we found that in fact especially females were going during breeding very far from the breeding island while they were rearing the chicks for example. They were going up to two thousand kilometres into sub-tropical waters. The next step was in fact that an observer from Australia, namely Nigel Brothers - he knew that the population on Crozet was declining, and he went on a long line fishing vessel in the Indian Ocean… And they found that there was in fact a large number that were killed including Wandering Albatross.
Long line fishing boats scour the ocean in search of highly prized fish like tuna and swordfish. They fish with lines up to 120 kilometres long, baited with thousands of hooks. But they aren’t just catching tuna…. They’re catching albatrosses.
 Albatross caught on long line hook
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Ben Sullivan: Albatrosses are attracted to long line boats because they process the fish onboard and they discharge a lot of waste. And so basically the birds are attracted to the vessel because of food. When they are at the vessel, they are also present when the lines are actually set. So a long line can contain several thousand baited hooks, and when these hooks first leave the vessel, they are near the surface of the water - and that is when these birds actually dive down, grab the hook, the hook becomes embedded in their beaks, and they get dragged underwater and drown.
More recently long line fishing boats have moved into the Southern Ocean to catch the oddly sounding but highly prized Patagonian tooth fish. As the boats moved closer to the Crozet Islands in the 1990s, Henri noticed the impact on the albatrosses.
Henri Weimerskirch: In the beginning when we found this problem, there was no long line fishing around the island. In the early Nineties the long line fishery for Patagonian tooth fish started. When the Patagonian tooth fish started around South Georgia, and around Crozet Island, the mortality of albatrosses was very high.
Albatross, like humans, live a long life. They breed only every couple of years and raise just one chick at a time. That slows population growth.
Henri Weimerskirch: They live for example on the Crozet Island – there are birds there still alive that were banded in the Sixties. So this mean that they are at least fifty-five years old. And so because they are long lived, they start to breed very late. This means that the average age of first breeding, for example, is about ten years old, and it will take about one year for the adults to raise the chick. This is the main problem with long line fishing - is that this fishery is killing adult birds, an important part of the population.”
In the poem The Ancient Mariner, the main character, a sailor, shoots an albatross and brings disaster to the ship. Today those fighting to save the Albatross feels that British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem has a global resonance.
And I had done an hellish thing
And it would work ‘em woe:
For all averred, I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow.
Prince Charles: I feel it should be our duty to ensure that we don’t lose any species if we possible can help it. But you know, particularly with the albatross, it’s so symbolic - think of the way in which we treat our world and the way we treat our oceans, and the way we exploit the fish stocks in particular. It would be such an appalling commentary on the way we treat the world. It really would be I think - and to call ourselves civilized, if we were to allow that to happen, would be a total misnomer I think.
Coleridge’s poem highlights the death of the albatross and in Part II we look at ways it can be protected.
PART TWO
After 19 days racing, the Volvo Ocean Racers rounded the Cape of Good Hope and entered the Roaring Forties. Albatross territory… For some of them it’s eye-opening.
Crewman on boat: I’m pretty sure we saw a Black Browed Albatross, and we saw plenty of the Sooty Albatross - particularly seen in the high latitude of the southern oceans.
Captain: As sailors, we’re often striving for this efficiency - to get the most of the wind and the waves - and, you know, they have nailed it. They’re cruising around the world, just using the up eddies off waves and things and the pressures… And they don’t even flap their wings, yet they can cruise around the world.
The Roaring Forties - and points south - are the real home of the albatross. There is no land mass – just tiny islands - and the winds roar endlessly round the world. The birds glide along cross-winds and tail winds, their heart beats barely rising above normal - even though they travel vast distances at tremendous speeds.
 Wandering Albatross
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Henri Weimerskirch: The birds - they can obtain speeds of up to a hundred and thirty kilometres per hour. Their flight speed over very long periods is about sixty to seventy kph.
There are now several tactics to combat the threat to the Albatross. Experts have, for example, devised several cheap ways to cut the number of albatross killed by long line fishing boats.
Ben Sullivan, BirdLife International: Because the albatross are diurnal birds, if you set the long lines at night you will in fact kill a lot less albatrosses.
Albatrosses are true oceanic nomads. They even sleep on the ocean waves. But if lines are set in daylight there are other simple devices…
Ben Sullivan: Adding weights to the lines means that the lines sink more quickly - so obviously the quicker they sink, the faster they are out of reach of albatross and other sea birds.
These weights must be heavy to sink immediately, since the birds will dive forcefully into the ocean after the bait.
Ben Sullivan: Streamer lines, which are simply a piece of rope tied to the stern of the vessel with a buoy on one end, and then series of streamers hanging from that line. And as the vessel pitches and rolls in the sea, and the wind blows, the streamers just move and that movement is enough to scare off the albatross from where the bait exits the boat. So the cost of a streamer line at around fifty dollars is nothing compared to the value of any of the high value target species such as tuna or swordfish or tooth fish which can be worth several thousands of dollars for a single fish.
Some long line fishermen claim there are advantages to using these devices. They prefer a fish, not a bird, on their hooks.
Long line Captain: I didn’t know it was so easy to avoid catching birds, because anyway we don’t want… long liners and fishermen don’t want birds in the line, because they tangle the lines and they avoid having a good catch.
Prince of Wales: These mitigation measures have been shown to reduce the damage to albatrosses to almost zero - so how do you then get the message across that these mitigation measures should be used at all times in all these fishing areas? And actually one of the things that I think is very impressive is the work being done these Albatross Taskforces - people going out and spending time with the fishing fleets, and indicating to people the damage that can be done and how you mitigate.
The BirdLife International Task Force is stationed in countries close to the Southern Ocean such as South Africa, Chile and Brazil. They give hands-on advice to fishermen on how to use simple devices to keep the albatrosses safe.
Task Force Member: You need to be out at sea and understand what conditions are like, and why things need to be practical, why they need to be cost effective.
The taskforce uses data showing where and when both albatross and boats are fishing.
Ben Sullivan: What it enables us to do is to look at the distribution of foraging sea birds both in space and in time and overlap that with fishing efforts. So you can target a certain area, and say ‘we know at this time of the year these sea birds are foraging in that area.’ Therefore it's quite likely that is a by-catch problem… you can see that there is a high level of overlap between fishing efforts and albatross distribution there, and similarly in the Indian Ocean. So this just shows the people how to manage these fisheries where the albatross are most at threat.
The fishery patrol vessel, the Dorada, operates out of the Falkland Islands to monitor fishing in the South Georgia fishery and keep illegal fishing boats out of the area. But even if a fishery is well managed, and has cut albatross deaths within its region, that hasn’t stopped the slaughter elsewhere.
Harriet Hall, Governor of South Georgia: Although albatross are very well protected inside Falkland Island waters, we are still seeing a decline in the numbers of birds returning to nest on South Georgia. This is because the albatross flies all around the world in their foraging for food, and they are still at risk outside South Georgia waters from unregulated and illegal fishing.
 Pirate boat
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Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated fishing is the official moniker given to the pirate fishing boats. These vessels, often sailing under flags of convenience, have no fishing licences and no interest in mitigation devices. They are responsible for an estimated one quarter – perhaps more- of all the albatrosses killed by long line fishing boats - thought to number one hundred thousand birds per year.
But the Southern Ocean is so vast; it’s not easy to catch them. Every now and again a pirate is caught. Both the British and French Governments have recently taken drastic action. The boats are cleaned of pollutants, their engines removed… and they are sunk. But catching pirate boats is a rare event…
However a new strategy is being developed – a plan to boycott the fish the pirates’ catch. All fisheries in the world are clearly identified. It’s now possible to know where fish come from.
Prince Charles: A lot is dependent on the retailers and big stores - they also can make a huge difference by deciding that they are going to obtain their fish only from certified stocks. In fact Wal-Mart, to give it its due - this huge company in the United States…the Chief executive told me last year that he had had a wake up call, as he termed it, from the Hurricane Katrina disaster. And he decided to take down a greener route, and one of the things Wal-Mart have done is to say that they’re going to source all their fish from sustainable MSC certified stocks.
The Marine Stewardship Council, MSC, is an independent organization that sets the standard for certifying fisheries. More and more companies are only sourcing fish from MSC certified fisheries.
Rupert Howes, CEO, MSC: Well, the MSC assessment process requires that any environment damage on the fishery must be identified, and where they are deemed to be affecting the functioning and integrity of the ecosystem, they must be reduced. Fisheries have used the third party assessment and endorsement by the MSC to win new markets. Consumers need to look out for the blue eco label, that label gives them the assurance that the fish product that they are buying hasn’t contributed to the social and environmentally problems of over fishing.
But for some, the shifting of the fate of the Albatross into the hands of the consumer can’t come too soon.
Ben Sullivan: These birds simply won’t survive with rates of decline of 3, 4, 5%. I mean it’s simply not sustainable.
After eight months, the Volvo racers had covered sixty thousand kilometres to reach the finish line in Sweden. It’s about half the distance an albatross covers in a single breeding season.
Volvo winning skipper: The first thing that blows you away is how big they are - and you know they have to get pretty close before you really do get a true feel for their size… You know you’re seeing some seriously big birds… It does mean a lot to us all, it’s amazing how such a bunch of staunch sailors can really be blown away by a big bird.
 Black-browed Albatross
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Perhaps it’s the fact that these sailors have had the chance to sail with the albatross that has changed the way they see them. Prince Charles, for his part, thinks that the fate of the albatross is in the balance.
Prince Charles: People didn’t seem to think it mattered that the dodo went extinct. But the albatross is I think an indicator of our claim to be civilised.
