Fact of the Day : What did 19th-century sailors make from the feet of albatrosses? (from The New Encyclopedia of Birds )
Albatrosses
Superstitious sailors once regarded the albatross as the repository of the souls of drowned comrades, and believed that to kill one was to court terrible misfortune. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner recounts how disaster befalls a ship after an albatross is shot. Even so, many 19th-century sailors were happy to catch and eat these birds to vary their monotonous diet on long voyages, and to turn their feet into tobacco pouches and their wing bones into pipes.
The name “albatross” comes from the Portuguese alcatraz, used originally for any large seabird and apparently derived from al-cadous, the Arabic term for pelican.
Albatrosses are distinguished from other families of their order (Procellariiformes) by the position of their tubular external nostrils, which lie at each side of the base of the bill rather than being fused on its top. They can be split into four genera: the “great” albatrosses, comprising six Diomedea species, which have wingspans averaging 3m (about 10ft); nine smaller species in the genus Thalassarche , which are often called “mollymauks” (from the Dutch mollemok , a name originally given to the fulmar); four North or tropical Pacific species in the genus Phoebastria ; and the all-dark Sooty and Light-mantled sooty albatrosses of the genus Phoebetria , which have relatively long wings. Recent molecular analysis has increased the number of recognized species from 14 to 21.
Champion Gliders
Form and Function
Albatrosses are renowned for their effortless flight, as they follow ships for hours with barely a wing-beat. One adaptation to reduce the muscular energy expended during gliding is a special sheet of tendon that locks the extended wing in position. Another is the sheer length of the wing, in which the forearm bones are much longer in relation to the hand than in other procellariiforms. To it are attached 25–34 secondaries, as compared to just 10–12 in storm petrels.
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How to cite this entry:
Michael de L. Brooke , Robert W. Burton , Peter A. Prince "Albatrosses" The New Encyclopedia of Birds. Ed. Christopher Perrins. Oxford University Press, 2007. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 15 February 2012
