Recently a question from my childhood has returned to plague me such that I could get no peace. Why is it that in certain Disney films foxes wear trousers and greatcoats and walk among human beings, while in others they dwell naked in the woods and flee from the coming of Man? What great calamity befell the Fox Civilization that caused them to lose the power of speech? Whence Disney Fox Carthage? I took a look at the foxes that appear in Disney films over the years and found a disturbing trend: threaded throughout the separate narratives was a second, shadowy backstory of loss and cultural degradation and foxes.

A grown adult woman with a string of failed romantic relationships and shallow, unfulfilling friendships apparently takes a perverse sense of pride in her preference for animals to people, as if it were an accomplishment rather than a tragic, self-imposed limitation.

Alone in her apartment, the woman who was raised by an entire family of human beings who did their best chooses to surround herself with mute, helpless beasts that are certain to die long before she does, who depend upon her to meet their every basic need.

“Humans are overrated,” the actual human being said.

Your indoor cat: You are sometimes overcome by the irrational and persistent feeling that everyone else you meet at social gatherings has been given a guidebook on how to behave normally and interact smoothly just before you arrived, and that they are secretly glad you have not been given one. You are, for once in your life, correct. They have been. And they will never tell you, and you will never see the book, but that does not mean it isn’t very real.

The most famous albatross in the world is dead: shot by the Mariner in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s long, strange  1798 poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” This is a shame, not just because the mariner spends the rest of his life under a curse, but because a dead albatross cannot fly, and flying is what albatrosses do best. Here is an incredible fact: an albatross can fly thousands of miles with scarcely a flap of its wings.

To understand how this works, and why it’s so impressive, you need some background albatross knowledge.*

Albatrosses are the largest of all seabirds. The biggest albatross species, the wandering albatross, has an average weight of about 20 lbs (context: a turkey is 17 lbs). Big birds are rarely also good fliers. The nine heaviest bird species (ostrich! penguin!) do not fly at all. But albatrosses need to fly. They live in the Southern Ocean and the North Pacific: inhospitable areas of ferocious winds and scattered scraps of land. If they want to eat, and to feed their chicks, they have to be able to transport themselves across long distances through the air.

The secret to albatross flight lies in the weight-to-wing ratio. An albatross has the longest wingspan of any bird. The average wingspan of a wandering albatross is 10 feet. There are aircrafts not much bigger than that. Furthermore, albatross wings are narrow and pointed, i.e. maximally streamlined.

This is our wandering albatross:

Let’s call him Wilbur, after this guy from The Rescuers Down Under, which is my primary albatross association, never mind Coleridge. (N.B. Wilbur’s clumsiness is a standing joke in the film, but that’s because albatrosses are terrible at take-offs and landings. Once they’re airborne, they’re dynamite.)