Together, they traveled across the sprawling north of the Pacific Ocean, between the Hawaiian and the Aleutian Islands. While her host wandered the stormy sky in search of squid or fish, she lived an untroubled life, clinging to the underside of a nice dry layer of down feathers.
During the Albatross’s mating season, these vagabonds of the ocean are obliged to return to land. On Midway Island, their frolics and the inevitable mutual grooming brought a temporary end to the gentle quiet where the tick had been burrowed. Having come face to face with beaks that penetrate the plumage over and over, she preferred to throw in the towel and let herself fall on the ground where other dangers await her.
The tick shows her amazing capacities for resistance: trampled by the bird’s webbed feet, uplifted by playful air currents, or even better, squashed by an egg that falls from a height of over a thousand times her size, she survives and gives birth to the next generation. The young ticks begin a very hazardous existence, the luckiest ones will grab on to whatever bird happens to pass by, the others wait on the corner of a rock for better days to come, others still will end with their host in a tiger shark’s jaw.
