Day 17 Flying Albert

Wandering albatross in flight

I promised yesterday to try and get some more pictures of a wandering albatross in flight. Well, here they are. They never cease to amaze me. And the closer they get to the ship (on a good day), the more it should be obvious how big they are. So why don't they look as big as they are?

That's because my brain is playing tricks on me. To my ornitologically untrained eyes an albatross look pretty much like a sea gull. And my brain knows how big a sea gull is. I've seen many. Many more than albatrosses. Some really quite close-up - usually when they steal chips out of my hand. Or when sea gulls scavenge chips out of litter bins by the sea side. So where I live sea gulls eat primarily chips - to my ears they can also talk but only one word "Mine!", but all of that is besides the point. The sea gulls I know aren't exactly huge.

The other day a couple of chinstrap penguins turned up at the ship while wandering albatrosses were resting on the water. I first mistook the chinstraps for a different species and then for small juveniles, because my brain had downsized them in presence of these huge birds. In my head everything is scaled back to the size of herring gull and as a result quite sizeable birds (like the supremely pretty cape petrel) shrink down to the apparent size of a swallow. I think I will have to meet with an albatross face to face to convince myself of their real size!

Well, I might just get a chance to meet an Albert in person. We had a briefing today about visiting the island of South Georgia and the plan is to visit there next week. There is a breeding colony of black-browed albatrosses on South Georgia, which is quite close to where we will be landing. The visitors DVD gave some details about the wildlife we can expect to see, but mostly dwelled on biosecurity measures. Every visitor has to wash and disinfect their boots, and hoover out all of their pockets and bags to prevent non-native seeds and plant material to be carried on to the island. The resident rats are bad news enough for the local bird population on South Georgia, so any additional alien species are not welcome at all.