Cynthia Benito, age 10, of Portland, Maine, for her question:
Can you tell me about the albatross?
His slender white wings spread 12 feet wide, so naturally we cannot crowd them onto a page. Nor do we have room to print all the facts about the great albatross. Besides, some of these reports are fanciful sailors' yarns. So let's be fair and give some of the true facts along with at least one of the fanciful albatross tales.
The famous wandering albatross has a dozen somewhat smaller cousins. All of them spend the greater part of their lives soaring like super¬sized seagulls over the great oceans. They belong to the sea and when the nesting season is over, they often do not visit the land again until next year's nesting season.
Four of the cousins have nesting headquarters along rocky shores around the northern Pacific Ocean. The other nine belong to the southern oceans and nest on the rocky cliffs around the Antarctic. Their basic color scheme is white, lily white, with touches of brown or black. All of them have very long, strong beaks, slightly curved at the tips.
The smaller cousins include the yellow nosed albatross and the black browed albatross, the black footed albatross and the brown footed albatross. But without a doubt, the most outstanding member of the clan is the famous wandering albatross whose wingspread is the widest in the entire bird world.
His body is about the same size as that of a white goose. But when he soars aloft above the sea, his slender wings measure at least 12 feet from tip to tip. He belongs to the Southern Hemisphere. When summer comes to the Antarctic, the males and females gather together from their lonely wanderings over the sea.
They perform elaborate courtship dances and the birds that are seven years or older pair off for the nesting season. The parents build a cup shaped nest of muddy materials and the female fills it with one big egg. Both parents take turns at keeping the egg warm through 81 long patient days. The one and only chick is a bundle of fluffy white, accented with a shiny black beak.
For a long time the patient parents feed their only child on partly digested fish food. But chances are he is too young to fly away when the summer ends. So the parents continue to tend him through the long cold winter night of the polar region. Come spring, the family separates and each member soars away on his or her lonely wandering.
Long ago, the men of old sailing ships gazed in wonder as the great albatross soared beside them, hoping for handouts. They imagined that his wide wings caused the friendly breezes and said he was a good luck bird. Anyone who harmed an albatross was said to bring doom to the ship and all her sailors.
A famous poem called the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner tells a long tale of this fanciful yarn. An old time sailor shot down an albatross with an arrow and all the breezes died. With no wind to fill the sails, the ship was unable to move. On the calm tropical sea, one by one the sailors perished from thirst but the old mariner survived to grieve over his crime.