Bloganuary 2025 Day 25
It’s difficult to feel proud of our species at the moment, but I always find looking to nature is a helpful way to redress the balance and provide some reassurance. I remember reading a book by a great author, Colin Tudge, called “Why Genes Are Not Selfish and People Are Nice” and I think I may need to dig it out and give it another look.
I love the Cornell Lab webcams and have used them extensively for studying and drawing different birds. There are various sites, including the Panama feeder where the beautiful Keel-billed Toucans hang out, along with the fabulously-named Chacalacas and iridescent Green Honeycreeper, but I have been watching the Northern Royal Albatross colony in New Zealand (where they are called toroa) as the egg has just started to crack. The chick can take almost a week to hatch, and during that time is very vulnerable to fly-strike, so the wardens remove the live egg and replace a dummy egg underneath the parent, so the chick can hatch in the safety of an incubator. Only one egg is laid every 2 years, so this baby albatross is extremely precious.
The birds are also protected from cats, stoats, cattle, and non-native flies. This means they have much greater success but being such long-lived birds – often making it well into their 40s – they don’t start breeding until they’re 8 or so, meaning any failed hatch has serious consequences for the population. They famously travel for miles looking for food, inevitably crunching up against the fishing industry and marine plastic, but I’m here to talk about how humans are nice so I won’t dwell on that. Did I mention about not eating fish? The population at this colony has stabilised since the intervention of the wardens, and I thank and admire them for their dedication to protecting these iconic seabirds.
In celebration of the hope of a newly-hatched healthy albatross to look forward to next week, I wanted to paint a picture. Albatrosses mate for life, and so here is a pair greeting each other having returned to their breeding ground:
