Wingsets and Snowdrifts: A Subantarctic Year – by Emily Mowat
ISLAND | ISSUE 165
It’s late December, and the subantarctic summer stretches out the daylight hours. On the slopes of the escarpment where the light-mantled albatross nest, egg hatching is imminent.
I approach one, sitting plump and pleased upon her scraped-together nest of mud and tussock. She’s as sleek as a Siamese cat, with slate-brown head fading seamlessly into a mantle of pale grey. Her crescent-moon eyes tell of pack ice and polar fronts.
I notice her stretching to gather scraps of grass within reach of her nest, and tucking them carefully under her body in preparation for her soon-to-hatch chick. Perhaps I shouldn’t, but I can’t help but proffer a dried grass stem myself, and, to my surprise, her powerful, hooked black bill delicately grasps it from my hand.
***
I’m now 10 months into the job as a field biologist on Macquarie Island, and encounters like this are no longer revelatory. Our senses are so incessantly overwhelmed, our synapses so constantly assaulted that we’re almost inured to the beauty and the horror that threaten daily to engulf us. It’s like watching a David Attenborough documentary that you can never turn off. On full volume. Seven days a week. Even through the night, the bellows and the whistles and the snarls carry on the wind, and we must learn to sleep despite it all.
We have watched giant petrels waiting to take down royal penguins as soon as they are disgorged by the surf, ripping their fronts open. We have walked through emptied winter penguin rookeries where the carcasses of those that never made it to the sea are trammelled into the mud (whilst oil-rendering trypots and digesters – grim reminders of an exploitative history – rust quietly away alongside). We have known the tears seals cry. And, once, seen the dorsal fin of an orca rising with ominous solemnity from a fathomless drop-off not two metres from shore.
We step casually now around the beach masters, vast four-tonne bull elephant seals whose bulk was so incomprehensible upon first encounter. With their billiard-ball eyes rolling, these snorting and snuffling sleep-apnoeics of the deep began to haul out in August on every available patch of coastline, ready to do bloody battle in the breeding season to come. The biggest of them now rest, victorious, amid the orangey putrescence of rotting bull kelp on the bouldered shore.
And so always, always we breathe kelp-rot and seal wallow, and the ocean-earth musk unique to seabird-kind.
“And so always, always we breathe kelp-rot and seal wallow, and the ocean-earth musk unique to seabird-kind.”
***
A few months before I left for the island, I received an email from my father. There was no context; it was simply a quote copied and pasted – the words of Captain Douglass, of the sealing ship Mariner, who upon visiting in 1822 described the island as: ‘the most wretched place of involuntary and slavish exilium that can possibly be conceived; nothing could warrant any civilised creature living on such a spot’.
It was too late, though. I, like many others before and since, was being drawn south by something I did not yet understand.
The 25-year history of the Macquarie Island albatross program is a long procession of biologists (mostly female, almost always young), who willingly gave up friends, family, partners, and the certainty of home for a year or more at a time, for a job that is as all-consuming as is possible. On the island with me are three other young women who have come to this place for their own reasons, all of us ready to give our time and immense bodily effort in the service of something like hope.
Were we all running away from something? Or towards something else?
***
It was the wind that I was least prepared for. Fresh from a three-day voyage on an ageing icebreaker, our limbs barely had time to unstiffen before we were off on our first familiarisation trip, confronted by the 60-knot gales that so often shriek across the gravelled ridgetops. All I wanted to do was run from it. And as winter descended, a hunting, seeking wind – made visible by the snow it carried – began rushing with intent in low eddies down the peaks towards us, before retreating furtively behind outcrops or trailing away over frozen plateau lakes. I know I was not alone in imagining it had a will of its own.
The ferocity of the island’s winds (it’s located in the latitude known as the ‘Furious Fifties’, after all) will suffer no tree to grow here. For the first few months, my mind too could not retain intact its own protective cambium, and the landscape within became as tormented as that without. Eventually, I began to imagine finding gaps in the wind and leaning into the spaces left behind: it passing through me, or I through it. Loosed from the distractions of technology and society, having ‘lost the miserable warping memories of traditions and of towns’ as Herman Melville puts it in Moby Dick, thoughts flow freely and unencumbered as they have not done in years.
***
Our days begin with a steep and sudden climb up onto the central plateau from one of the field huts dotted around the coast. Hauling ourselves up hand over hand by tussock clumps of varying stability, our breath catches in our lungs in the cold air. I never get used to it. On top of the plateau – across feldmark, bog and fen – lie disembodied wingsets of prions and petrels, pulled by predatory skua from the mouths of burrows. Here and there, rosettes of their plucked feathers bloom unexpectedly like white flowers. Walking on the plateau is mercifully easy-going, but before long we peel off from the track and drop down the side of the escarpment to our target site for that day.
The work is ostensibly straightforward – our mission is to traverse the slopes, finding and recording with GPS the locations of any albatross nests. We read their uniquely numbered metal leg-bands, which have allowed researchers to find out that these birds may live for 40 years or perhaps more; studies have not yet continued long enough to know. We record the status of each nest, and revisit it many times over the season to track its fate, allowing us to monitor year-to-year trends in breeding success. A ‘successful’ nest is one where the chick makes it through the long season to fledging, dependent entirely on its parents timing their foraging trips to sea to provision it sufficiently. As oceans warm and currents shift, these trips may become more taxing and lengthy, leaving the chick for longer periods between its slick meals of regurgitated stomach oil.
Most of our days on the slopes are spent struggling through head-high tussock grass, growing unrestrained now that rabbits no longer graze on the island. In 2014, a successful eradication program saw the island declared free of all feral mammals for the first time since sealers landed on these shores in the 19th century, bringing with them the cats, rabbits, rats and mice that did untold damage to the island’s ecosystem. What may appear today an ‘untouched wilderness’ (that problematic phrase!) is no such thing. The island is instead a testament to how much that was once thought lost can be regained.
“What may appear today an ‘untouched wilderness’ (that problematic phrase!) is no such thing. The island is instead a testament to how much that was once thought lost can be regained.”
Frequently, we come to impassable screes tumbling down from landslips above, or come up against precarious ledges, ideal nesting spots that we dare not test with our human weight. Back and forth we go, climbing higher and higher with sometimes painfully slow progress, back towards the top of the escarpment. On days when rain squalls roll in from offshore, or the mists descend from the plateau above, any fancy I might have had about belonging in this place is rightly severed. Up in these ramparts of moss and black rock, you may stand above all things but find that you are nothing. Not here in this fortress built by tectonics and time, for the albatross alone.
“On days when rain squalls roll in from offshore, or the mists descend from the plateau above, any fancy I might have had about belonging in this place is rightly severed. Up in these ramparts of moss and black rock, you may stand above all things but find that you are nothing. Not here in this fortress built by tectonics and time, for the albatross alone.”
***
Sometimes on my way to work, or in a listless moment, I look out toward the edge of the horizon, as far as I can see. Snow clouds, smog-grey and edgeless, form a somehow skyless sky. Squall-lines approach then retreat suddenly seaward over rock-stacks and islets. It strikes me that I no longer think of the distance, nor dream of all the ways over the sea to the Auckland Islands, Campbell, or the Snares (or, further still, to lands too large now to comprehend). These are now beyond the limits of my known world, one that’s bound only by the names of familiar mountains, tracks and lakes.
Coves, capes and points are named for ships wrecked there in centuries past – Caroline, Aurora, Eagle. It’s barely worth considering how many must have died and suffered here, whether victims of wrecks cast into a freezing sea (and likely unable to swim), or sealers dying of scurvy or starvation in rough shelters caked with the soot of blubber-fires. How many ghosts must inhabit the place – if you believe in such things.
Even today, given the nature of our work and the remoteness of comprehensive medical care, death remains a possibility. It lurks at the edges of our days as we make our judgements about which outcrop to climb (Could we get back down from there, if we go up?), or which ledge will hold our weight (Is there anything to grab onto if it breaks?). A story has been told and retold over the years in field huts (who knows the exact truth anymore?) of the unfortunate albatross researcher in the 1970s whose misjudgement of an unseen cliff edge saw him break his back as he fell onto the rocks below: ‘Did you hear – he had to fend off the skua that were trying to peck out his eyes while waiting hours for help to come!’ or: ‘They rerouted the nearest ship to come save him, but too late – he died anyway once onboard!’
One thing is certain: I did not expect a pre-job requirement of writing my will at the age of 27.
***
A solitary iceberg drifts by towards the end of our time on the island, unmoored from the lower latitudes. It’s a rare occurrence, we’re told, and all the station comes out to see. It’s reported in the Hobart Mercury, and we feel famous for a time.
We celebrate the appearance of the iceberg, as it begins its inevitable break-up in these warmer waters, by putting washed-up chunks of it into our drinks. We celebrate, too, several warm days of 14°C (a seemingly pleasant change from typical summer temperatures of 3–6°C), whilst knowing it is nothing to celebrate at all.
“We celebrate, too, several warm days of 14°C (a seemingly pleasant change from typical summer temperatures of 3–6°C), whilst knowing it is nothing to celebrate at all.”
It’s a reminder that the long arms of global climate change reach even this far. Along with the increasing average temperatures, the rain falls differently now too: these days, heavy rainfall occurs more frequently, instead of the constant light, misty drizzle that used to be the prevailing weather pattern. Azorella macquariensis, an endemic cushion plant of the feldmark, appears to be an early victim of such climatic changes: each year, dieback increases under what feels like a too-hot sun.
For now, this place remains a refuge. But for how long?
***
It is nearly time to leave. Soon the red ship looms once more in the cove, like an apparition through the sea-fog. I know soon enough we will be sailing back up the Derwent River into Hobart, but am not prepared for how the colours of that world will seem somehow too bright, nor how the scent of eucalypts will meet us even whilst still out at sea.
All of us know that in returning to The Real World (as we have come to call it) we must find new ways of being, in places no longer familiar, as life expands beyond its base elements once more. But the island will always be there. It’s a place to dream of, and a place to hold hope for, and perhaps it’s enough that it exists.
I still think of the albatross, forever peeling off from ridgetops and crags: scythe-winged sentinels of bluff and cliff, their sky-calls giving voice to the wind. ▼
Photograph courtesy of the author
This essay appeared in Island 165 in 2022. Order a print issue here.
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This essay was shortlisted in the Island Nonfiction Prize, which was supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.