Birds have the same thing.” I often saw pairs sitting belly to belly, arching their necks and nuzzling together their heads to form a kind of heart shape. “All those sickening things that couples do that gross out everyone else but the two people in the couple?. “Like when you’re in a couple,” Marlene Zuk, a biologist who has visited the colony, explained to me. Couples preen each other’s feathers and engage in elaborate mating behaviors and displays. They take shifts: one bird has to sit at the nest while the other flaps off to fish and eat for weeks at a time. Once together, pairs will copulate and collaboratively incubate a single egg for 65 days. It feels like an airport baggage-claim area. At any given moment in the days before Thanksgiving, some birds may be just turning up while others sit there killing time. There are about 120 breeding albatrosses in the colony, and gradually, each will arrive and feel out the crowd for the one other particular albatross it has been waiting to have sex with again. When I visited Kaena Point in November, the first birds were just returning, and they spent a lot of their time gliding and jackknifing in the wind a few feet overhead or plopped like cushions in the sand.
Their “divorce rate,” as biologists term it, is among the lowest of any bird. Albatrosses can live to be 60 or 70 years old and typically mate with the same bird every year, for life. Each bird has spent the past six months in solitude, ranging over open water as far north as Alaska, and has come back to the breeding ground to reunite with its mate. Every November, a small colony of albatrosses assembles at a place called Kaena Point, overlooking the Pacific at the foot of a volcanic range, on the northwestern tip of Oahu, Hawaii. The Laysan albatross is a downy seabird with a seven-foot wingspan and a notched, pale yellow beak.
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