Ready for release from the hands of Audubon Society biologist Simon Perkins. Photo: Joanie Tobin

At Length Did Cross an Albatross

On a hot, still Saturday morning in early June, a band of seafarers sped east out of Boston Harbor, anxiously eyeing a plastic crate in their midst. The crate’s occupant, a yellow-nosed albatross, had spent much of the month of May convalescing at Tufts’ Wildlife Clinic, part of the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, and was about to be released back into the wild. The humans—a veterinary technician and professional and amateur ornithologists—were there to see the albatross off.

It was the bird’s second farewell party. In late April, it had turned up, exhausted and scrawny, in a cow pasture in Cape Neddick, Maine. It recuperated for the next three weeks in the Wildlife Clinic’s climate-controlled swimming pool, under the care of Flo Tseng, an assistant professor of environmental and population health. The bird was released on a beach in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on May 21. Four days later, a motorist found it on a highway 20 miles north. It was returned to Tufts, where Tseng discovered that it had lost its waterproofing and more weight, and so back to rehab.

Albatross, it almost goes without saying, aren’t native to New England—or any land at all. Built for long-distance soaring, albatross prefer the wide southern Pacific and the endless loop of the Arctic Ocean to the Atlantic. Adults spend their entire lives at sea in the southern hemisphere, coming ashore only to breed and raise chicks.

There have been just 35 official yellow-nosed albatross sightings in North America since 1885. Ornithologists call birds so far from home “vagrants,” as though the birds drunkenly steered off course. But Richard R. Veit, a seabird expert who had come up from the City University of New York to watch the release, doubted this yellow-nosed had wound up in Maine through negligence. “I think this is a normal process in these birds,” he said. “Somehow they can assess their environment. When something is off, they strike out.”

And, indeed, something could be said to be off. Of the twenty-one species of albatross, nineteen are endangered and the other two are threatened. Commercial long-line fishing kills some 100,000 albatross per year, while introduced species such as rodents, feral cats, and cattle have forever altered the albatross’s favored nesting sites. Nobody knows what insults drove this yellow-nosed to New England.

A week into its second captivity, the albatross was still underweight, but Tseng, its caretaker, was hesitant to detain the bird further. “The longer it stays here, the more likely it is to develop other problems.”

By noon on Saturday, the mariners were cruising up the western edge of Stellwagen Bank, a national marine sanctuary 25 miles east of Boston. There were gulls and gannets, shearwaters and petrels—seabirds with needs and habits similar to those of the albatross. The air smelled heavily fishy. Simon Perkins, a Massachusetts Audubon Society field ornithologist, took that as a good sign. “We left him to his own devices the first time around,” he said. “This time, we are going to stick him in a pile of fish.”

With the engines cut, Perkins lifted the lid off the plastic crate to reveal the albatross, its soft, dense breast feathers silvery white. A humpback whale surfaced and sighed as Perkins lowered the large, calm bird onto the flat water. The bird dipped its head to take its first drink of real seawater in more than a week.

“You must feel better than anyone,” Perkins said to the veterinary technician, Kathy Briscoe, a longtime volunteer at the Wildlife Clinic who had driven the albatross from North Grafton to Boston that morning. Briscoe had helped Tseng rehabilitate the bird, even persuading Whole Foods supermarkets to donate large quantities of fresh fish to suit its finicky tastes. Before Briscoe could reply, the bird took off, spreading its long wings to glide just inches above the wate¬r. The onlookers hoped the bird would live a long if solitary life in the fish-rich waters of Stellwagen Bank.

Alas, it would not. Almost a month later, the body of the albatross was discovered on a beach in Barnstable, Massachusetts. The biologist who restored it to Tufts’ Wildlife Clinic estimated it had been dead for two weeks.

Tseng and her colleagues can still learn from their enigmatic visitor. From the skeleton, the scientists might be able to determine the bird’s sex—a surprisingly difficult call with this species—or pinpoint its age. Tissue necroscopy could reveal what ailed the bird, or why it was such a picky eater. But no lab test will explain why or how this vagrant albatross flew thousands of miles, only to expire on a Cape Cod beach.

“This bird was almost by definition the most exotic animal to come to this clinic,” Briscoe, the veterinary technician, said later. “I feel honored to have crossed paths with it.”