At Sea with the Marine Birds of the Raincoast by Caroline Fox

Author:Caroline Fox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: RMB | Rocky Mountain Books

An adult short-tailed albatross. IMAGE COURTESY OF KIRK ZUFELT.

Their history, so seemingly exotic and far-flung as breeders in Japan and wanderers of the Pacific, is actually embedded in the history, both oral and physical, of this coast.

I try to imagine a coast where massive, pink-billed albatrosses trail in the wake of our coastal ferries and fishing boats, but it’s a place so far from present reality. Short-tailed albatrosses are still exceedingly rare on the coast; in all, less than 100 individuals have been sighted in British Columbia’s waters since the mid-1990s.91 This is a number that misrepresents the fact that far more short-tailed albatrosses wander these waters undetected by human eyes.

To me, the young short-tailed albatross, slightly shyer than the black-footed albatrosses, floating before me in the grey sea represents the unpredictable and often shockingly robust nature of wild species. Flipping the coin, I wonder if the short-tailed albatross would have become extinct without our long-term and highly intensive conservation activities after we’d done our very best to wipe them off the face of the planet. The gambler in me – which conservation biologists are increasingly becoming as they bet on which species they should attempt to save – would unwillingly put money on a world without short-tailed albatrosses. Because they are listed as threatened in Canada and ranked among the rarest of the world’s albatrosses, I wonder if I’ll ever meet one again.

We leave the lone short-tailed albatross in the company of milling black-footed albatrosses. Months later, while pouring over the photographs on a large computer monitor, I catch sight of a metal band around the bird’s leg as it ran over the surface of the water. Because the birds of the Senkaku Islands are not banded, this individual can be traced back to Torishima Island and may belong to the larger and more genetically diverse lineage.

The Great Bear Rainforest

The sighting of the short-tailed albatross marks the onset of severe conditions in the offshore waters. We run for Rose Harbour, located on southern Haida Gwaii. I spend the next few days in a state of prolonged euphoria from the albatross encounter, interspersed with data entry – which I have come to thoroughly despise – and snorkelling in the giant kelp forests that fringe the bay. Beneath the waves live abalone, urchins, red rock crabs, jellyfish and a dazzling array of nudibranchs. Above the waterline, black oystercatchers, with their neon bills, squeal and flit back and forth across the bay.

On our return transect to the mainland coast, we cross with cloudy, sepia-tinged skies and choppy seas. We move through what seems like bell curves of birds; first Cassin’s auklets build then wane while encounters with ancient murrelet families grow. Next are sooty shearwaters and, as the mainland mountains grow large, rhinoceros auklets forage in the waters around us. Unexpectedly, a flock of Sabine’s gulls, led by a single Arctic tern, diverts their course to circle us before resuming their strange movement. As darkness falls, the silhouettes of seabirds returning to coastal colonies, mostly rhinoceros auklets and common murres, flood past me in lines.

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