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Mated pair of Buller’s albatrosses (Thalassarche bulleri) nest on the cliffs of an island in the Snares archipelago, about 120 miles south of mainland New Zealand. The birds usually choose a mate when they’re eight years old or so, and stay with their partner for life several decades more.

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No self-respecting birdwatcher should mistake an albatross for a pelican, right? Yet etymologists can trace the word albatross back through the annals of early seafarers’ logbooks—albatross . . . algatross . . . alcatrass—to a Portuguese word, alcatráz, which was used for a variety of large seabirds. And alcatraz, a word now famous as the name of the old island prison in San Francisco Bay, probably came from an Arabic term, al-câdous, or “bucket”-mouthed bird—the pelican. Pelicans, though, never venture far beyond the coasts and live to perhaps twenty years of age. Albatrosses live forty to sixty years and are adapted to the open ocean—with special salt-excreting glands that enable them to drink seawater; well-developed olfaction for tracking down food; and superb navigation skills that guide them back to isolated specks of land for breeding.

Although a pelican and an albatross can hardly be confused, even the sophisticated birdwatcher may find it a challenge to distinguish among all twenty-two albatross species (the number currently recognized by the World Conservation Union, also known as the IUCN). Those species fall into four genera that fly the gamut in size, appearance, distribution, and population: the great albatrosses (Diomedea, six species); the mollymawks (Thalassarche, ten species); the North Pacific albatrosses (Phoebastria, four species); and the sooty albatrosses (Phoebetria, two species). Since the mid-1990s ornithologists have been using molecular data for further classification, but haven’t yet reached a consensus. What is certain, however, is that people have taken a toll on the entire family, the Diomedeidae. Every species of albatross is currently included on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, with ten facing the highest risk of extinction in the Endangered and Critically Endangered categories.

Courtship display of waved albatrosses (Phoebastria irrorata) on Española Island in the Galápagos involves elaborate sequences of gaping, bowing, bill-fencing, and sky-pointing, accompanied by loud screams, moans, and sighs. Averaging seven to nine pounds, this mid-size albatross species is critically endangered. Estimated at 35,000 individuals in 2001, the population appears sharply on the decline, with recent studies indicating a drop in the birds’ average life expectancy.

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Long before our forebears were naming them or having any effect on them, albatrosses were riding the winds and waves. The earliest fossils of recognizable albatrosses and their closest kin, the petrels, date back some 32 million years, and come from places as disparate as modern-day South Carolina and Germany. At least 9 million years ago, genera very similar to living species were ranging over the Southern Ocean, the North Pacific, and the North Atlantic.

Albatrosses are found today throughout the southern oceans, but in the Northern Hemisphere they are limited to North Pacific waters. Fossil evidence suggests that most species may have disappeared from the North Atlantic during the time period when the North and South American continents became connected by the Isthmus of Panama, about 3.7 million years ago. These days when southern individuals occasionally stray into North Atlantic skies they can get stranded there, in confusion.

The majority of albatross colonies are located far south of the equator, on the remotest islands in the inhospitable, uninhabited reaches of the Southern Ocean. Colonies in the tropical and subtropical latitudes of the North Pacific, though, are more easily accessible to people and have been greatly impacted by that exposure.

Raising at most one hatchling each year, albatrosses intensively nurture their offspring for several months. If even one parent is killed at sea during that time the chick will starve. Here, a greyheaded albatross (Diomedea chrysostoma) feeds its chick on Campbell Island, 400 miles south of mainland New Zealand.

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Fowling, such as it was known, was banned by Japan in 1906, yet it continued illegally in Japanese waters—and elsewhere—for many years afterward. The birds have also succumbed to less deliberate assaults. In the late 1930s, Midway, a sandy atoll in the Hawaii archipelago, was bulldozed and partly paved over with concrete to become a U.S. naval air base, which would be crucial for transpacific wartime flights. The atoll was an important nesting ground for the Laysan albatross, and collisions between birds and planes became a major hazard for aviators and albatrosses alike. More recently, since the atoll was made a National Wildlife Refuge in 1988 and the Navy departed in the 1990s, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and armies of volunteer conservationists have been fighting battles of a different kind on Midway, combating introduced plants that choke prime nesting habitat. Even the aging buildings are proving deadly: albatross chicks unlucky enough to hatch near them get poisoned when they eat chips of the peeling lead-based paints. Plastics, too, picked up at sea by parents and fed unwittingly to chicks, are wreaking havoc.

The greatest overall threat to albatross survival, however, whether in the north or in the south, is the world’s ever-expanding appetite for seafood. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, an international fishing fleet of about 4 million vessels supplies every person on Earth with an average of thirty-five pounds of seafood annually. More than 60 percent of all that fish and shellfish is wild caught in marine waters. No part of the world’s oceans, the albatrosses’ far-reaching fishing ground, is untouched.

Albatrosses and petrels range far and wide precisely because catching prey is not easy. Their access to the ocean’s bounty is limited to the depth they can reach from the surface, and as far as we know, only a few albatross species can dive deeper than a few feet. When vessels ply the oceans to catch fish and squid, they bring to the surface large quantities of the same elusive resource that large seabirds strive to capture. And so birds have been using men to fish for them since whaling ships first took to the sea. Ocean sailors like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner encountered albatrosses not only because the birds spent most of their lives flying far out at sea, but because they followed ships for days, hoping for a bonanza offish offal, bait, or food scraps.