Elegy for the Northern Royal Albatross
They called you Grandma -
matriarch of Taiaroa Head.
Your husband of seventeen years,
Blue-Green,
named after the colours of the bands
they placed around his leg.
For over sixty years you
returned to this windswept
piece of Otago coast to breed.
The surrounding sea
a golden harvest of fish
into which time and time again
you dove at sickening breakneck speed.
On clifftop nest your last chick,
Button, crying to be fed.
You fished your heart out on
ocean voyage yet
he not yet fledged lost weight,
but forever present the keen eye
and caring hands of Shirley Webb.
Most of your life was spent at sea -
a radius of continents -
Chatham Islands,
The Sisters, Hello friends!
As always gliding majestically.
Born in 1927, you died in 1989,
no doubt in some bastard
foreign driftnet or deep water longline.
Nylon can’t fly
nor fools heed the curse
of the Ancient Mariner’s Rime.
So glide on Grandma,
glide on your satin silver wings,
for great will be
forever your beauty
the memory of you brings -
three million miles flown lost at sea.
Written: 1991
*Grandma was lost at sea aged at least
62 years.
*She was at the time the oldest banded
breeding albatross recorded.
*Taiaroa Head is in Otago, New Zealand.
*Shirley Webb was a conservationist
and guide who lovingly looked after
the albatross breeding colony.
*As of October 2022 Button still returns
to Taiaroa Head to breed. He is 33 yo.
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