I found another dazed storm petrel today, in the same place. At first, it looked like a little lump of feathers, but as I watched, it stirred itself and tried to fly. Clearly, it was not ready to take off.
The ship is a small community, so it didn’t take me long to find Ed Sobey, our oceanologist. Ed and his wife Barb sailed across the Pacific in a sailboat, which has all of us in awe. He travels around the world teaching science and is a great source of information about whales. wind, water, weather—and now birds.
Ed has one of the cabins with a private balcony, and he took our first petrel there for R&R. It’s a little hard to tell the critters apart, but he says there have been at least three now. His guess is they get caught up in an unfamiliar wind pattern when they get near the ship and are pulled in, crashing into the side and stunning/injuring themselves.
Outside of Ed’s cabin are nautical charts and plots of the waves from day to day. He posts interesting notes to the public files nearly every day.
He doesn’t usually look like a pirate. Today we caught him up by the weights, ready for a workout. Still, it’s a good look for him, don’t you think?
No comments:
Post a Comment