YOU GOTTA MOVE

The broad wingspan of this roamer carries it across the oceans in search of food

- Mike Dilger's

LONG BELIEVED TO BE A SYMBOL OF GOOD fortune, the albatross has its own annual world awareness day on 19th June. As legend would have it, the bird embodies the souls of sailors lost at sea, and to harm one was considered disastrous and likely to invoke the sea's wrath.

Nowhere is this better conveyed than in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It chronicles the story of a mariner who shoots an albatross and is forced to wear the dead bird around his neck - as penance and to ward off any future misfortune at sea. A deceased albatross 'necklace' still serves as a metaphor for a weighty burden.