It’s Not You, It’s Climate Change
Albatrosses do not fall in love the way humans do.
When the birds couple up, it’s almost always for keeps. Their lives start lonely—albatross parents lay only one egg at a time, and may leave their offspring unattended for days—and at just a few months old, each juvenile embarks on an epic solo voyage at sea. They fly for months and months and months, learning what it is to be a bird. “It can be three years before you see them again,” Francesco Ventura, a bird biologist at the University of Lisbon, told me.
The adolescent albatrosses return to their colony single and ready to mingle. They touch down, find a group of like-minded individuals, and start to dance. At first, “it’s kind of like being at a club,” Melinda Conners, a bird biologist at Stony Brook University, told me. The young hopefuls
