For the next couple of months, the crucial task is finding food enough to survive. Studies in the Indian Ocean suggest young albatrosses suffer about 40 percent mortality in the first two months post-fledging. How they learn to forage—do they watch experienced older birds?—no one knows. We do know that while albatrosses eat mostly squid, they often gather around fishing boats, waiting for food in the form of scraps, guts—and baited hooks.

If you kill an albatross you are not forced to wear it, nor will it doom your ship. But nowadays every albatross has humanity around its neck. "There are optimists and there are worriers," says Beth Flint, a biologist at the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. "My job is to worry about albatrosses. A hundred thousand drown in fishing gear every year. They're the world's most threatened family of birds."

The Falklands' black-browed albatrosses have lost about 38,000 pairs in the past decade. Nic Huin, a soft-spoken, heavy-smoking French scientist with Falklands Conservation, calculates they've been declining one percent annually. Among the throngs, that one percent doesn't seem like much—until you realize 38,000 pairs is nearly one adult bird every two hours. One percent is like a giant invisible eraser that could, over time, wipe away every bird in view.

In 1988, Australian conservation biologist Nigel Brothers first linked fishing boats with the albatross declines scientists were reporting. The birds trail boats deploying longlines—up to 50 or so miles (80 kilometers) long—with thousands of baited hooks. If hooked while trying to steal the bait before the line sinks, they drown. Albatrosses also crowd behind vessels dragging trawl nets, where slicing cables can strike their long wings. Free lunch it isn't; albatrosses get killed faster than they can breed.

Brothers has worked on the problem with fishermen, surviving fire at sea and a vessel sinking. "Fishing is hard, monotonous work; thousands of hooks baited, deployed, and hauled per day," he says. "If fishermen have to do something extra to save a bird or a turtle—if they don't have an easy option that costs nothing—it won't happen. You have to make conservation easy." They have. Brothers and Eric Gilman, of the Blue Ocean Institute, are collaborating with fishermen to simply add weight to the lines and set them from the side of the boat instead of from the back. With side-setting, baits sink beneath the hull, out of birds' reach. Other measures include dyeing bait dark blue and setting lines at night.

The result: Over the past ten years the Hawaiian fleet's kill of all seabirds dropped 97 percent. "But Hawaii's efforts won't be enough," Brothers says. He's seeking worldwide standards for longlines. Weighting lines would probably fix 80 percent of the problem.