I know I came back from this place with a sense of both the fragility of life there and its robustness. These reefs are very re- mote, so they do not suffer the destruction of inshore reefs with the runoff of fertilizer nutrients from the Queensland coast. When mariners came to islands like this in the old days, as when HMS Bramble called at Raine Island in 1843, their first act on landing was to break every egg on the island, so that they could know that the eggs they found next would be fresh. Reefscape with birds the impression is one of layer upon layer of birds, each with their preferred level in air from which to plummet into the sea below. Boobies and terns fly in the Michelle layers, with frigate birds remote in the high layer of air, ready to swoop onto other birds.
Boobies are so clumsy on land, so awk- ward in their takeoff from land to air.
But once aloft they fly with minimal wing movement as they take advantage of, here, the uplift of air there, its fall. At the Chesterfields another marvel is the fecundity of this reef, how 400,000 birds can find enough fish to live on, as obvi- ously they do. My experience of the Chesterfields showed me there is still some wilderness out there in the world. Wilderness is often described in Northern Hemisphere terms that are irrelevant to those of us in the Southern Hemisphere, such as the distance that can be walked in a forest without seeing evidence of human artifice. We are remote from other lands and people, but still the predominant sense is of the overwhelming presence of the birds.