As I was (and still am) sitting at my desk today waiting to find something to do, I got to wondering. And you want to know what I wondered? I wondered how an Albatross can fly for months at a time without landing.So...since I had the time, I looked it up. And here is the answer in a nutshell.
They don't flap their wings to keep moving rather they utilize two methods of soaring. Dynamic soaring is when they fly into the wind and their wings lift them up, and then they glide down and when they get close to the water they tilt so the wind picks them up again. The other is called slope soaring and the albatross rides the wind that comes of the back of large waves.
The real secret though is that they have tendons on their shoulders which lock and hold the wings open. So they aren't expending any energy at all to keep their wings extended like most other birds, and are actually as comfortable as if they were at rest. All they do basically is lean into and out of the wind (when they are not hunting anyway).
Additionally I learned that because they are expending such little energy while flying, their heart rate drops to about what it would be if they were resting, so they don't need to sleep. (I guess that makes sense because the only other alternative is that they fly at night with their eyes closed, and...well, that's just silly.)
Something else related to the albatross (although not scientific at all) is that in the "olden days" sailors supposedly considered it bad luck if one decided to follow their boat. In one of my polar exploration books one of the men said it was because they were supposed to be the souls of sailors lost at sea, forever searching the ocean for their ship...I think that's kind of romantic.
Well, I'd better go...I have a lot of wondering left to do today.
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