Searching for the Seabirds of Mardi in a Time of Crisis in the Pacific

Aboard the Robert C. Seamans, a tall ship of oceanography that sails with undergraduates in the Pacific, it is regular practice each daylight hour for two or three students to pause their work in the lab and come out on deck holding a clipboard with a laminated sheet featuring pictures of common types of seabirds. The students stand to port and starboard with binoculars and wax pencils. For six minutes, they tally any and all birds that they see. On hundreds of occasions over the decades-long travels of this ship through the central Pacific, seabirds have flown closely by the vessel, swam nearby as we sat stationary to deploy scientific gear, and even occasionally landed on the spars or rails. Once, during a passage from Oahu to Fiji, two dozen red-footed boobies took up residence aloft; another time, off the Kermadec Islands north of Aotearoa New Zealand, the ship floated among dozens of sooty terns. The nineteenth-century whalemen called them “wide-awakes” (Green 67), which made sense after we sailed beside their colony all night long.