Culture and outreach
Folklore & Tales
For as long as people have gone to sea, seabirds have been guides, omens and symbols.
The albatross
Sailors long held that killing an albatross brought bad luck. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) made the idea famous. "An albatross around the neck" still means a burden of guilt.
Souls of sailors
In many seafaring traditions, seabirds were believed to carry the souls of drowned sailors. Storm petrels were called "Mother Carey's chickens", and their appearance was said to warn of bad weather.
Guides to land
Pacific navigators read seabirds to find land. Birds that feed at sea and return to land each night, such as terns and noddies, showed the direction of an island at dusk.
Seabirds in history
In the 1800s, guano from seabird islands was so valuable as fertilizer that nations competed for it. Seabirds and their eggs were also long an important food for island communities, from the Faroe Islands to St Kilda.
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