It's graduation day at Midway Atoll, near the northwestern end of the Hawaiian archipelago. With only 2.3 square miles (6 square kilometers) of land, Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge hosts the world's largest albatross colony—nearly half a million pairs. (In 1909, responding to Japanese plume hunters killing albatrosses by the tens of thousands, President Theodore Roosevelt declared many of the surrounding islands a bird reservation—enforced by gunship—and saved North Pacific albatrosses from extinction.) Some islands still lie silent of albatross voice. But at Midway, now refuge headquarters, it's albatrosses, albatrosses everywhere: under the trees, all over the lawns, in doorways, on steps, at the dining hall doors.

First light unveils a shore thronged with hundreds of thousands of young albatrosses poised momentously between hatchlinghood and their flying lives. At this critical transition, many are on the knife-edge of life and death. Corpses of goose-size chicks litter the island. A few have wing deformities, likely from eating lead paint flaked from buildings. Hideously, the body cavities of many dead chicks contain cigarette lighters and other discarded plastic their parents swallowed at sea and fed to them. Some have starved. Others succumbed to heat.

Yet survivors dominate. They're big youngsters sporting downy remnants around their heads like lion's manes or Mohawks. Whenever a breeze sweeps through, these juveniles begin flapping. If it's very windy, entire fields of albatrosses wave their wings in the air, testing them. Eventually the birds will begin running the beaches until the slap, slap, slap sound of running feet ends with hard-earned airborne silence. Initial flights are short. Above the laboring juveniles sail adults whose effortless speed and grace indicate a concept perfected.

Yet today there's not a bee's buzz of breeze to loft them. Well, if the wind won't take them, their feet will. Hungering for the horizon, the birds simply walk into the water, wings hoisted like sails, paddling across the lagoon. For hours, more venture across the turquoise calm until an albatross armada stretches out of sight.

Each breathless dawn sees wave after wave of young albatrosses step out of the vegetation and paddle away. About 13,000 are leaving daily. It is March of the Albatrosses!

Where are they going? Biologist John Klavitter pilots our boat over the lagoon. Scanning with binoculars, we realize that at the point where the lagoon's mirror breaks into a million shimmering shards of sunlight sit albatrosses by the tens of thousands. The water is soupy with birds. While thousands sit bobbing, hundreds are trying the sea breeze. Their youthful excitement is infectious. But most of the birds seem afraid to cross the surf. Some fly straight at the ocean, then U-turn over the breakers and veer back into the lagoon.

It's high drama in slow motion. If they stay, they starve. Doldrums are costly. All the paddling and flapping has debited their energy accounts. But enough young albatrosses are flying outside the reef, over the deep cobalt swells, to show that birds are slowly suffusing into the open North Pacific, their true home. They've earned their wings.