KEY POINTS:
It takes a big book to tackle the biggest of flying birds. It helps that photographer and author Tui De Roy also has a few things in common with these whales of the sky. Like the albatross, she's something of a globetrotter with addresses in Belgium, the Galapagos Islands and Nelson's Golden Bay. She loves being far out at sea and, also like the albatross, she has a bird's name.
Not that there's anything frivolous in her intent.
But then how can you be frivolous about a creature with a wing span of 3.5m that can carry it across an ocean in a single flight - although whether they sleep on the wing is still a moot point.
"Albatrosses have a deep significance to me and always have," says De Roy, a world-renowned wildlife photographer. "I grew up near the sea, I've always been attracted to wild places and I think these birds bring those together - freedom and wildness."
It was her desire to chase that connection that led to her book, Albatross.
"I moved to New Zealand in 1992 and found myself in the albatross capital of the world. More than half the world's species nest here somewhere. I just wanted to see them all."
This isn't as easy as just driving to the coast - to reach the most spectacular colonies with some of the rarest species you have to travel past the black stump to spots like the Auckland and Campbell Islands or Tristan da Cunha in the southern Atlantic.
No problem, De Roy and then partner Mark Jones built a boat. After all, they'd done plenty of sailing around the Galapagos.
"You could say we found quite a bit of difference between the tropics and the sub-antarctic, that was quite a steep learning curve. But we were well prepared. Yes, we had a lot of experiences, one freak wave knocked us over and caused a lot of damage, but that was all part of the challenge of getting to know how these birds live. It was during that time that we came up with the idea of doing the book. It was such an amazing experience, the birds were completely unafraid. They're big birds, so relatively we aren't that intimidating to them. Some would walk over and stare you in the face. I remember one in the Campbell Islands that was just hanging on the wind staring at us, then the wind changed and it plopped into Mark's lap, still staring at him."
But the end result is far more than cute photographs: "Albatrosses are made for life at sea, which puts them out of sight and mind for most people," says De Roy. "This is our attempt to show how extraordinary and how endangered they are. We must not lose them. The problem is that they roam the world so saving them can't be done by any one country, this is going to take a global effort."
* Albatross, by Tui de Roy with Mark Jones and Julian Fitter (David Bateman $69.99), is published on August 22.
