Birds · plate 34 of 60
Albatross
Diomedea exulans
Crosses an ocean for lunch. Comes home to the same bird.
Only 1.1% of people are Albatrosses. (estimated)
If you're an Albatross
You travel further than anyone you know and stay more faithful than any of them. A wandering albatross glides on a three-meter wingspan for thousands of kilometers without flapping, sleeps on the water and comes back every other year to the same partner and the same patch of rock; you are a loner on the move and a lifelong friend at home.
An albatross can lock its shoulder so the wings stay spread without effort, and its heart rate while gliding is barely above resting.
The Albatross as a spirit animal
Matching an Albatross says you need distance the way other people need sleep, and you are completely trustworthy anyway. You are calm, long-sighted and unhurried, and your few loyalties are permanent. The flaw is that you are away a lot, and the people at home have to take the devotion on faith. Albatrosses dance for hours before pairing and then barely need to. You should still dance occasionally.
Grounded in how the species actually lives; nothing borrowed from anyone's tradition. Why we put it that way.
How to get along with an Albatross
Do
- Let them go; they always come back, on their own schedule.
- Keep the home spot exactly where it was.
- Write; messages that travel a long way are the kind they understand.
Don't
- Don't ask them to stay put for long. Land is not where they work.
- Don't read absence as indifference. For an albatross they are different things.
When it goes wrong: An Albatross under pressure simply leaves, calmly and for a long time; don't chase, keep the nest site warm and trust the return, which has never yet failed.
The Albatross in a relationship
You love once and for the duration. Albatross pairs spend years perfecting a dance together, breed every other year and hand a single chick back and forth across months at sea; you take love slowly, seriously and with long gaps in it. You never doubt the gap. Make sure they don't.
Field notes
Every animal is placed on six personality traits derived from how the species lives. Your answers are placed on the same six, and the closest animal wins. How the scoring works
- Sociability
- 4
- Boldness
- 4
- Energy
- 2
- Curiosity
- 3
- Devotion
- 10
- Roaming
- 10
- The wandering albatross has the largest wingspan of any living bird, up to about three and a half meters.
- Young albatrosses leave the colony and may not touch land again for five years or more.
- Pairs stay together for life and raise a single chick every two years; the chick takes most of a year to fledge.
Albatrosses in literature
- The Albatross — The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1798)
- The Albatross — Les Fleurs du mal (L'Albatros), Charles Baudelaire (1857)
- The Albatross — Moby-Dick (The Whiteness of the Whale), Herman Melville (1851)
Characters from public-domain works. Company, not a verdict.
Closest personalities
The animals whose profiles sit nearest to the Albatross's. If you got Albatross, one of these was probably your runner-up.
Other birds
EagleOwlRavenHummingbirdPeacockPenguinFlamingoParrotSwanWoodpeckerFalconOstrichPigeon
Among the 60
Ottův slovník naučný, Jan Otto (publisher) (1888). Public domain, viacommons.wikimedia.org.All credits
