Albatross wings
(hard vore, soft vore, digestion)
 
The fledging albatross had made it back to dry land. This was the fourth time his attempts at flight had ended with him landing in the water. He was tired from swimming back rapidly, not wanting to end up in a tiger shark belly like two or three of his brethren he had observed from his few seconds in the air. This fifth time was going to be the one. It simply had to work! After a quick breather he tested the wind again. It was still a good breeze and he tried to do like he saw his parents do, running into the wind, spread his wings, use all the lift he could gather and then turn around to let the wind carry him . It looked easy but it really was not. But if he wanted to be a proper avian, he needed to get airborne properly. He was worried about the dangers lurking below the surface of the water, anxious to not land in the sea too far from shore again. But with the island being a tiny rock and the wind being as it was, there was only one way to not get too close to the hungry jaws that lurked beneath: Start on land and touch down on land.
Determined to prove himself the albatross spread his long wings and ran as fast as his webbed feet could carry him. His feet pattered rapidly over the dry rock and he felt the wind gripping his feathers. He angled his wings better this time and just before the water’s edge got too close, he started to beat his wings properly. His chest muscles still felt a little sore, but with his improved technique he managed to take off almost gracefully. Excited he continued to beat his wings, working his way upwards, his entire body supported by nothing but air. With gratified chirps he called attention to his achievement and soon engaged the next challenge. Flying against the wind was a good way to take off but not sustainable in flight. So he tilted his tail feathers and angled his wings in opposite directions to bank left and fly a slow sweeping curve. Now he had the wind at his back. This was the part that had caused him to crash in his earlier attempt but now he was stable, gaining speed. The island housing the albatross colony took him minutes to traverse on foot but now it just soared past underneath him. It was exhilarating, but even with the wind at his back he had to turn around eventually.
He was a couple hundred meters from shore now as he banked to the right this time, performing his turn as smoothly as the last time but when the wind hit his face and he saw how small the island looked, he realised his mistake. He had flown out too far and now the ache in his chest really made itself known. He let out a distressed call but it was not like any of the other birds would or could do anything to help him. This was his trial now, he had to make it back to dry land or crash in the very toothy waters below. As if to taunt him, he saw a large splash below and heard a soon muffled shriek coming from where one of his brethren had landed, far closer to the shore than he was now. But a second after the pained call, all he could see was a dark shape gliding through the water with one albatross wing sticking out to the side. Now that he had nothing but painstaking windward travel to occupy his mind, the albatross fully grasped what he had ignored so far. The tiger sharks which encircled the island were getting better at eating his kind. A few days ago the fledgelings had a decent chance of survival but by now a water landing was close to a death sentence. He had just been very lucky so far to not be among the one or two albatross juveniles that got snatched up and devoured every minute.
As if on command, he saw another one of his kind bobbing in the water one second and then replaced by a grey head and snapping jaws the other. In the time it took him to beat his wings twice, the water had calmed again and it looked as if the other bird had never been there in the first place. Only he knew that it had been relocated to a shark’s stomach. This certainly was a great motivation to push beyond the burning pain in his muscles, ensuring that the land was getting closer and closer. He might just make it.
However, just as he collected all his ill founded hope, the albatross felt the wind picking up. He lost speed and altitude while his wings felt heavier than ever. He exerted himself more for a smaller reward and no matter how much he tried, his wing beats grew smaller and weaker until he eventually had to glide to a perilous water landing. As he glided low over the water, the ground effect helped him to carry on for a few more meters as a cushion of air formed between him and the water, but already he was feeling the panic setting in. Every shadow in the water looked like a shark now, even if it was just some rock. He knew he would be dead if he tried to swim all the way back home and he knew he was going to have a very hard time taking flight from the surface, given how weak he now was.
 
Eventually he touched down on the water with a gentle splash, his burning chest muscles welcoming the small respite, his breath panting and his heart racing like never before. It was not just the exertion, it was the cruel certainty that his life was on a timer unless he could take to the air again immediately. He saw several familiar faces pointed at him, some hundred meters or less away from him, wondering just like him if he was going to get airborne or consumed.
With shaking yet quick motions he unfurled his wings and started to tread water, trying to push his body up, preparing to take off once more. Luckily his legs were well rested still and at least those provided some almost hopeful success in step one of his life saving endeavour.
Then his legs were suddenly feeling a tug, split seconds before losing all contact with the water whatsoever. His heart and time itself stopped for the albatross. He looked down and where he had hoped for blue water he perceived what was to be expected. The water he had been sitting in was gone, replaced with a great yawning gullet and flushed away through flaring gill slits through which he could see the abyss of the ocean. Shiny serrated teeth were framing most of his view as he was suspended above a tiger shark maw much wider than his parents’ nest. The maw was as deep as his wingspan wide and even though he desperately ordered his wings to flap, to carry him away from the looming, seemingly waiting horror underneath, nothing seemed to happen. His descent was so slow, as if to mock him for his earlier confidence. Focussing on nothing but flight, the young bird pointed his head forwards, looking at a dozen sets of morbidly curious eyes in the distance until they were replaced by the bright pink insides of the sunlit maw. When his wings finally decided to follow his command and time seemed to return to its usual pace, it was already too late. His left wing was utterly engulfed by the maw, just like his entire torso and head. Only his right wing struck the shark’s lower jaw, feeling as if he had hit a rock. But this only triggered the hungry giant he now technically inhabited to bite down. The speed at which the maw closed seemed frightening to the sluggishness with which his wings had reacted to his desire to flee, but the inevitability of his fate only hit home once the serrated teeth blocked out almost all light and eventually interlocked. His bones were snapped like sun dried twigs and he felt gravity shifting and water flooding back in through small gaps in the shark’s maw as he was dragged under water. He knew the eyes which had witnessed his fate would just turn away with disinterest now. After all he was only one out of hundreds of fledgelings to get eaten this week. The only upside to all this was that his adrenaline levels had peaked so far that he registered the crippling obliteration of his wing by vibrations and sound rather than pain while his heart felt ready to burst. However his predator was not granting him even two seconds to get used to his new surroundings. Instead, muscles several times his weight undulated below him, their actions manifesting a casual gulp which dragged him right into the now gaping throat of the shark. Most of his body was simply dumped within the dark greedy chute to the shark’s stomach, the rest soon followed as the beast swallowed. He was nearly crushed by the strong peristalsis and as darkness engulfed him, he had no means of telling whether he was hearing more bones breaking or the already splintered ones getting moved in terrible ways. But none of this mattered, now that nature had reduced him to just an avian shaped lump of fuel for a large predator’s metabolism.
 
One more eager swallow forced him through a minor restriction in the otherwise smooth and slimy tube he was being passed through. Beyond it was the last horror he was condemned to experience in his cut short life. Upon entering the tiger shark’s stomach, he was pressed firmly into a seemingly amorphous soggy mess. Instinctively he tried to breathe, experiencing a sharp pain even over his numbing adrenaline rush as the only gases in there proved to be acidic fumes that quickly shrivelled his burning lungs. Mockingly gentle undulations mixed him with the other stomach contents as the shark swam around, probably looking for yet another unlucky bird to devour. Too late in protecting his eyes from the omnipresent digestive acids, the bird was alive for just long enough to realise he was merely one of several albatrosses populating the shark stomach in various stages of digestion. He was not even a meal for the tiger shark but merely a puzzle piece in a week long binge dozens of his conspecifics were yet to fall victim to.
 
 
Once her meal was nice and settled in her busy stomach, Eli turned her eyes back to the surface. She had arrived late yesterday, but had still managed to grab three of those tasty birds before the sun had gone down and her prey had stopped their flying exercises. Having been able to start feeding at dawn, she had just beat her number from the day before and was looking forward to maybe six more hours of regular splashes caused by ten to fifteen kilos of nutritious poultry landing right above her. Over time the competition had increased though, more and more tiger sharks had arrived and some of them were not as easily bullied out of the best spots. But with an empty weight of nearly one and a half tons, Eli was the biggest predator around and really good at compelling others to leave their catch to her instead of finding out how badly she wanted it.
Right then she was far from empty. Including her spiral valve which was busy filtering through yesterday’s birds for nutrients, she had over a hundred kilos of birds in her belly. The freshest addition to her diet was still kicking too. Not as fiercely, though, as the dolphins or lemon sharks she habitually fed on around her home island. But the gentle little undulations of that slightly crunched up albatross sitting in a melting stew comprised of its kind felt almost as rewarding to her as the weight in her stomach. But Eli did not reach her size by holding back on the food. She might be full enough to not bother with bullying larger sharks out of their spots now, but she would not say no to a few more birds in her belly. For now she was circling around the same area where she had taken her last two meals, occasionally sticking her head out of the water to take a look at the sky and check if her prey had moved with the changing winds again.
While the massive tiger shark glided through the water, her many senses focussed on finding her next meal, her belly was working on autopilot. The gentle contractions of her huge swimming muscles kneaded her vast stomach and its contents, especially when she made a turn. As a result, the otherwise round cross section of her J-shaped stomach was occasionally getting dented on one side and then the other as her sleek tail pushed her through the water. When that happened, all the fresh and partially melted avian meat was being pressed together and mixed through with the acids that oozed from the slimy walls. Digesting her catch was not entirely easy during albatross season. Not because avian meat was hard to melt, far from it. Being a tiger shark, Eli’s digestive tract handled things like turtle shells, shark teeth and the skeletons of whole dolphins. But the small amounts of water that came down along with every bird caused her stomach’s timing to get a little out of order. Usually she devoured one or two large prey items and then let her stomach soak it in acids for around three hours, before the churning of the powerful organ’s muscular walls even started. But with fresh prey and sea water entering her cavernous stomach every hour or so, her stomach seemed to refuse to clench down on her meals, leaving the mixing of contents to her swimming muscles. Eli realised that these birds took an unusual time to break down, but she had a stomach capacity of around half a ton, so she could just continue gorging like this all week even if she was not breaking down her food at all.
 
Luckily for her, a lack of peristalsis did not stop her concentrated stomach acids from taking their job very seriously. The albatross she devoured just minutes ago was already entirely soaked in the flesh eating liquids and in just two hours or so he would look much like the ones it shared her stomach with: A roughly bird shaped naked lump of meat that was severely burned by acids, with an outer shell of discoloured meat that had the consistency of soap that had been left in water overnight.
When her stomach convulsed under the stress of another tight turn, the new bird’s dead eyes were idly staring through the darkness at the hollow sockets of his predecessor’s melted ones. With every minute its skin softened, losing feathers and gaining blood red patches as the digestive juices rose and changed colour from clear to light brown as the birds stewed. Eli’s stomach was well under way to reaching the churning phase of her digestion, when the gentle sways of her swimming suddenly turned into violent contractions.
Now the stomach contents were splashing everywhere, loose beaks and bile soaked disfigured avian shapes were impacting each other until the stomach clamped down so tightly that nothing moved at all. Then the whole belly relaxed once more and rhythmic jolts went through the entire shark body until the generously sized valve at the entrance of the stomach opened once more, introducing half a liter of water and a -for now- healthy albatross to its contents.
 
In the end this was Eli’s last bird of the day. Her stomach was finally allowed to do its work undisturbed. Her last meal massaged her stomach from the inside for maybe two hours before falling unconscious, leaving Eli to simply rest near the surface and enjoying the warm sun that heated her body, aiding in her digestion. After all, even her stomach juices needed a little help to liquefy large beaks.
Once she went into a sleep-like state, wondering if she should look for a strong handsome male after maybe another day of feasting on birds, her stomach finally commenced churning. Her swimming muscles had done a good job keeping her food in motion, but in the end her stomach did its own job the best. Slow, deliberate contractions rolled along her stomach front to back, calmly mixing violent chemicals and food, scraping flesh of dwindling corpses and pushing chyme to the much tighter lower part of her stomach’s J-shape. Bit by bit the meat was being melted and plucked off the various albatross’s corpses, the beaks and bones of their predecessors helping in the process as Eli’s stomach moved continuously. Eventually all the useful bits were melted down into a sludge and her stomach switched one phase further, evacuating the many liters of former birds into her spiral valve, allowing the space efficient organ to filter through a new batch of nutritious slurry.
All that was left behind were beaks, crumbled bones and bleached feathers. Most of that would get broken down or ground up eventually as well. The few remnants that were immune to hydrochloric acids and pepsin would eventually be regurgitated in a week or so. But until then, Eli was trying to snatch up twenty or so more birds to make the long trip worth it.