What my Bird does

Just think about it for a moment.

The plane that flew me a quarter of the way round the globe last night cost not far off half a billion pounds, has space age navigation equipment and provides more horsepower from its two engines than the Titanic did. It thunders along seven miles up at about 530 mph and descends with pin point accuracy to a small runway just south of the River Plate. It has a crew of about thirty, all of whom combine in one way or another to make sure we get there in roughly the same health as we left London. Out we all get and, eventually, back home it goes.

Compare and contrast it with the thing I’ve come looking for, the Manx Shearwater. A specific one, called T72.

Around the end of August, once they have fed her on half-digested fish to be about 50% heavier than either of them, her parents suddenly disappear and leave her to it. Deprived of feeding, she loses 33% of her body weight, and some signal tells her to pull out all her downy feathers so that the flight feathers can emerge.

One night in mid September, driven by hunger, or curiosity, or impatience, or all three, T72 paddles her way out of her burrow late one night, has a couple of experimental flaps and then flies off alone into the darkness. I watched her go.

No one tells her what to do, where to go or how to feed herself. Something deep down just draws her southwards, past Biarritz, past the Canaries, past Senegal and across the Atlantic to the waters off Argentina. 8000 miles later, no one tells her to stop. She just does.

What is more, she won’t touch dry land again for three or four years, until she is adult and ready to breed.

And when all is said and done, she is the size and weight of a large paperback book. If she is lucky, she might live for fifty years, have 35 chicks or so, and fly four or five million miles.

If someone had said to me a year ago that I would spend a large part of a year of my life following her, and learning about her, I would have thought them mad.

In three or four days, I’ll be out on her ocean, too, which makes me very excited.