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…