Now that I turned 60 over a year ago and have had a chance
to test the waters a bit, I can affirm that not only is being in one’s sixties
far, far better than the alternative, but also that the sixties can provide as
many wonderful experiences as any other decade. Since turning 60, I’ve seen my
lifer California Condor, taken my best photos ever of Northern Gannets, Boreal
Owls, and even otters, become an author of a National Geographic bird book, and
overall been having a jolly good time.
But one albatross—the only wild bird known for certain to be
even older than I am—seems to be putting my activity level to shame. Back in
early 1956, Chandler Robbins banded a breeding female Laysan Albatross on
Midway Island in the Pacific. Today Robbins is one of the most respected and
beloved ornithologists in the world—the lead author of the Golden Guide field
guide and the man who started the Breeding Bird Survey—but then he was a
hard-working young employee of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, working on the
banding project in order to work out win-win strategies to save the Midway albatrosses
from extermination while protecting military aircraft coming and going on the
island.
We have no idea how old the albatross was at the time, but
she had to be at least 5 years old to be nesting, so she had hatched out at the
latest in January or February of 1951, and may well have hatched years earlier.
Since Robbins originally banded her in 1956, her leg band has been replaced
several times—leg bands can easily last a decade and sometimes more, but birds are
overall sturdier than aluminum or plastic. In 2001, Chandler Robbins started tracing
records of each band replacement of the older birds on the island, and realized
that this particular albatross was one of his 1956 cohort of banded birds. That’s
when she was given the name “Wisdom.” Now she’s at least 62 years old, yet in
late 2012 she and her mate produced yet another fertile egg, which hatched on
February 3, 2013. Chandler Robbins told reporters, “While I have grown old and
gray and get around only with the use of a cane, Wisdom still looks and acts
just the same as on the day I banded her.”
Some people have commented to me that her feathers look
awfully good for being 62 years old, but they’re not—albatrosses replace every
one of their body feathers once a year along with many of their flight
feathers, and none of the flight feathers are older than three or four years
old. So she doesn’t have to worry about going gray. Being a bird, she also doesn’t
need to concern herself with stray hairs growing in on her chin or giving her
an unwanted mustache. Unlike humans, birds of both sexes are usually attracted
to the oldest mate they can find—experience counts for a lot, and unlike us
mere mammals, avian fertility and the ability to ability to raise young seldom
diminish with time. And birds of neither sex bother with mirrors anyway, going
about their lives without stressing about superficial matters.
I take supplements that include Omega-3 fatty acids to
prevent my creaking joints from getting sore. I presume Wisdom’s fishy diet
protects her from that sort of thing, but nevertheless, all the obstacles a
bird faces make surviving for 62 years darned remarkable.
The researchers
tracking her estimate that she has flown up to 3 million miles since she was
first banded. That’s “4 to 6 trips from the Earth to the Moon and back again
with plenty of miles to spare,” said one spokesman. Like I said, she puts me to
shame, and she’s still laying eggs and raising chicks. It’s ever so lovely to realize that I’ve spent every
single day of my life on the same planet as this remarkable bird. I hope she
returns to Midway Island to raise chicks for many years to come.