Online albatross jigsaw puzzles for armchair marine ornithologists

Puzzle this one: Tristan Albatross and chick on Gough Island, photograph by Michelle Risi

“The days of our years are three score and ten” - Psalm 90, verse 10 (King James Bible).  It seems then that the ACAP Information Officer is several years past his sell-by date!  One outcome of this is that his field work with albatrosses and giant petrels on Gough and Marion Islands, conducted over near four decades since the late 1970s, is now a thing of the past and well into his eighth decade he can be properly described as an armchair marine ornithologist, armed with laptop rather than boots, rain gear, notebook and banding pliers.

Good then that he has recently discovered one can assemble jigsaw puzzles online, dragging pieces about the computer screen by mouse or touch pad until they click into place, all from the comfort of his self-isolating home in Cape Town by visiting https://www.jigsawplanet.com. Even better, is that the website has nearly 90 puzzles depicting albatrosses ready to be assembled.

A quick look though the website shows jigsaws available for 15 of the 22 albatross species (although not all are captioned to species).  Four examples selected here are of the Short-tailed Albatrosses, George and Geraldine on the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, a Grey-headed Albatross on Islas Diego Ramírez, a multitude of plastic pieces from the stomach of an albatross chick and a painting of a Tristan Albatross by ABUN artist Lois Davis for World Albatross Day 2020, from a photograph by Michelle Risi.

Puzzlers (it’s a word!) are able to choose how many pieces they wish to assemble for each puzzle, from 24 to 300.  Further, assembly effort is timed, so if you are of a competitive nature you can compare your completion time against the website’s fastest puzzlers.  Lastly, if you sign up you can load your own photographs so you and others can get puzzling with them, such as this one of a Tristan Albatross and chick on Gough Island, from a photograph (see above) by Michelle Risi.

Self isolating or in lockdown with spare time due to COVID-19?  Well get albatross puzzling!

*Although there are not (yet) many petrel and no shearwater puzzles.

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 03 December 2020