Moore checks leg bands and applies new ones so gently that each bird remains sitting tight on its egg. The birds nibble his fingers with their sharp-hooked bills. The birds impart to these lonely slopes a magic disproportionate to the facts of the grass, the distant ocean, and a few big birds.

Despite Campbell's isolation, rats arrived with seal hunters in the 1800s; would-be farmers arrived around 1900. Everything they brought—grasses, sheep, cattle, fires, dogs—was bad for albatrosses. They called albatross eggs "good to eat too, bigger than a goose egg." When the settlers left, around 1930, perhaps as few as 650 pairs of royals remained. Rats devastated nearly everything else. Since the Department of Conservation's 2001 rat eradication, smaller seabirds, snipes, Campbell Island teal, insects, and flowering herbs are returning from offshore islets. Southern royal albatross numbers rose to about 13,000 breeding pairs by the mid-1990s. But something has held them to that level. In a lovely nest an abandoned one-pound egg indicates a lost partner, plus a mate forced by hunger to abandon its effort. Cause unknown.

Albatrosses' siren-like beauty has tempted me to some of the loveliest and loneliest places on the planet—and today into a punishing gale. Its gusts threaten our planned six-hour hike to the island's north end and its dense colonies of Campbell and grey-headed albatrosses. In these latitudes, wind can sweep right around the bottom of the world, then come in body blows to punch you off your feet. Gusts repeatedly flatten us. Against one blast I plant my walking stick yet am catapulted right over it. Never has hiking left me so beat up. But albatrosses love wind, and I love albatrosses, so. . . .

When we reach the north cliffs under skies thickened with clouds, thousands of large birds glide through sun shafts between the low-crouching heavens and the pewter sea. The air carries their raucous braying and the not-unpleasant scent of guano. Mud-pedestal nests packed pecking-distance apart are topped by month-old chicks that sit upright like foot-tall snowmen. I watch as adults arrive to feed them. Parent albatrosses convert food into high-density oil with a caloric content that's been compared to diesel fuel. When a parent arrives, it and the chick excitedly position their bills crosswise. Then the adult squirts a stream of oil as if filling a tank. An adult may spend 15 minutes ashore feeding its youngster a meal that's a third the chick's body weight, then leave again for another trek of several weeks and thousands of miles. Between feedings, the chick converts oil into bone, flesh, and feathers. The chick grows so much between visits that adults recognize them not by sight, but by voice or scent.

I linger for hours, drinking in the action and spectacle, knowing that while the scene seems eternal, my own wanderings urge me onward. I too have miles to go across the deep.