ONE AUTUMN DAY HALFWAY through the 20th century, a Laysan Albatross returned to Midway Atoll, built a nest in the sand, and settled in to incubate her annual egg. A firm believer in “nestsite fidelity,” the albatross had made this same trip most autumns of her adult life—doing the work of countless generations of albatrosses before her. Each year millions of seabirds return to this tiny island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean to breed. And over the centuries, the generations of humans who watch these seabirds have given them myriad names: mōlī, a nod to the tattooing needles that native Hawaiians once crafted with the birds’ bones; albatross, derived from an Arabic term for “diver”; Laysan, after an even smaller neighboring island that, in turn, was named for a Russian explorer’s ship.
This particular mid-century albatross was probably called “gooneybird” by the few thousand humans living on Midway in the years after the Second World War. The moniker served as a collective nickname for the albatross masses that waddled past Midway’s Naval air station, barracks, and Gooneyville Lodge. But let us pan down from this unnamed gooneybird and zoom in on her egg, because inside that shell is an albatross story that stretches into the next millennium.
This egg will hatch without fanfare, and the bird inside it will spend her life as expected: at sea 90 percent of the time, flying back to the same square of sand to incubate no more than one egg per year with her long-term mate. As the decades pass, she will keep returning to Midway, logging at least three million flight miles. She will build nests for more than three dozen eggs in 65 years. And while she does so, the albatross will cross paths with a roster of humans who are keen to keep tabs on her: naturalists, photographers, volunteers, and, eventually, superfans.
When humans learn that this bird has lasted into her sixth decade, she will receive a name all her own. Not mōlī or gooney, but Wisdom: a worldwide symbol of nature’s endurance and hard-won seabird smarts. Her longevity will make her the star of children’s books, an icon on tote bags, and the subject of countless jubilant news reports. Because Wisdom, the inhabitant of this mid-century albatross egg, will live to become the oldest wild bird on the planet—as far as
