Joe reads a couple of scientific papers each morning before he gets out of bed.
It puts him in the mood for his day job, which is, er, writing scientific papers, and makes him a genuinely fascinating person to spend time with. Which is what I happened to be doing in the Oxford University Zoology Department late yesterday afternoon, when he suddenly said a propos absolutely nothing: ‘Take a look at this.’
Joe is only 23, but he is fast becoming a world expert on a particular seabird, but the paper he showed me, written back in 2004, wasn’t even about his specialist bird. It was about a single gray-headed albatross.
It was a bird that was rigged up with a GPS, so that a research team could follow its 14 day feeding trip down in the sub-Antarctic wastes beyond South Georgia, and know more about its foraging habits. It also carried wet-dry data loggers so that they knew when it was on or under the water, and stomach temperature loggers that inform when the bird is feeding. For 14 days, the albatross fished away in the pelagic waters west of South Georgia until it was 1000 km south west of the island, relatively close to the Antarctic peninsula. It’s what it did next that blew their minds.
Presumably sensing a deep depression and approaching storm, the bird turned for home at about 9.00 am on the 11thMarch 2003. Ten positions were obtained during its subsequent flight, which not only showed that it flew pretty much straight back to its nest on Bird Island, but that it did the entire journey in of 1000 km in just eight and a half hours, averaging, once you factor in an averagely sinuous course, close to 130 kph, (or 80 mph).
To put that in context, it is like a car going from John o’ Groats to Lands End in about ten hours.
Between two particular points, it averaged over 160 kph (100mph) on the front edge of the wind.
And it hardly flapped its enormous wings once.
And it had time to stop and feed a couple of times.
If that doesn’t blow your mind, you have set the bar very high in your appreciation of nature.
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