albatross ovenbird In his book The Old Ways, Robert MacFarlane provides the following footnote: 'Albert Ross' the albatross first appeared on Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth in 1967, then relocated in 1972 to the vast gannetry at Hermaness on Unst in the Shetlands, to which island he returned annually for more than twenty years, before disappearing for a decade, and then visiting Sula Sgeir between 2005 and 2007. He seems to have been wandering the Scottish gannetries in search of a gannet partner, gannets bearing a passing resemblance to albatrosses as they do, and the 700,000 female members of Albert Ross's own species all residing, inconveniently, south of the equator. 𓅮 𓅯 𓅰 You have no memory of home, but you know this isn’t it. You spread wings dipped in pitch and take to northern skies in a place where no one knows you, where every superficially familiar face holds just a touch of the uncanny. I know what it is to search every pair of eyes for a chance at love only to find that no one will meet your gaze. I know what it is to feel that something about you is wrong. How many times have I said, “I don’t think I belong here” and then scanned the crowd for someone to tuck me under their wing? How many times have you despaired in your knowledge that casting a shadow is the closest you will get to pressing your body to another’s? Maybe we are not so different. My wings are as pale as your flight feathers, your arms are more than wide enough to hold me. There is no home that can nest us both but I can imagine a place between cliff and ocean and sky that we might stretch to reach, where my fingers meet the softest parts of you, and you serenade me with a silken snap of beak. Maybe in that unlikely moment of meeting we will see ourselves made whole and for every day after I will only have to look skyward to know who I am. 250706 what's it to you? who go blather from