Did You Know
– the albatross has one of the widest wing spans of any bird!
The albatross, as a seabird, gets caught in many fishing lines…..which result in them drowning!
“The Albatross Task Force, led by BirdLife International and its UK partner, the RSPB, is an international team of experts on a mission to reduce seabird bycatch by 80% in some of the world’s deadliest fisheries.
In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” a sailor kills an albatross and thereafter, as a punishment, is forced to wear its carcass around his neck. And so albatrosses came unfairly to represent a burden from which one couldn’t escape. However, the literary phrase has it all backwards. It fails to capture the terrible burden humans place on this group of huge, majestic seabirds, which range widely across the Southern Ocean and the North Pacific.
