Antipodean albatrosses float over the ocean like huge, graceful seagulls, though the brown patch of feathers atop their heads makes them look a bit like men wearing toupees a size too small. Earlier this year I thought I’d seen a pair of them resting on a slab of rock at the edge of Kangaroo Island, but of course they were some other, more common bird I nonetheless couldn’t identify. Albatrosses don’t often rest on islands inhabited by people, and anyway I was more than 2,000 miles of mostly open sea away from the craggy islands off the coast of New Zealand where Antipodeans like to nest.

I think what jumpstarted my hopes was seeing just the two of them looking out on the water. Antipodean breeding pairs often mate for life, but each year some of the males arrive home and wait for partners who won’t ever return. Females prefer different hunting waters, and they’re more fond of the lawless, violent ocean between New Zealand and Australia known as the Tasman Sea. The Tasman may finish off the last Antipodean albatross before 2050, and it’s one of a select few swathes of ocean that have killed enough seabirds to make them the most endangered group of birds on Earth. To save them, ornithologists across the planet are mapping the most mysterious parts of the high seas, developing a blueprint to stop the slaughter of birds that spend their lives gliding above the surface.

No place is more important to seabirds than the Tasman, and arguably no person has more influence over making the region safe for them than Stephanie Borrelle, BirdLife International’s marine and Pacific regional coordinator.

Borrelle spent her early 20s trying out photography in New Orleans, but living through Hurricane Katrina convinced her that she had to do something for the environment. Like the albatrosses she wound up studying, Borrelle made the long journey home to her native New Zealand. She went back to school, where an advisor convinced her to study seabirds. Within a few years, Borrelle was standing on a desolate island off the coast, just a few feet below a blizzard of whooping Royal albatrosses, one of the largest birds in the world. She couldn’t get over how these graceful flyers transformed into adorable waddling bobbleheads the moment they touched the ground. The birds pooped on everything, and Borrelle’s nostrils filled with a stench like sun-baked fish. “It smells pretty bad,” she said, but “you’re a seabirder if you like the smell of guano.”

Seabirds have historically been difficult to study, and this lack of research has not helped the plummeting number of terns, petrels, shearwaters, albatrosses, and others. Scientists from BirdLife International first began to make up the knowledge gap in the 1970s, when they set off for windswept islands in the north Atlantic, south Pacific, and Arctic oceans, sticking gloved hands into shallow burrows to pull out startled bundles of feathers they could tag and release. Researchers found that fishing lines were throttling thousands of albatrosses, and by the mid-1990s the United Nations agreed to help reduce accidental seabird deaths, but the commitment had little impact. In 2005, BirdLife International began identifying parts of the ocean that needed protection, but numbers kept falling. By 2012, 28 percent of the world’s 346 seabird species were threatened or endangered because of rampant fishing, swallowing plastic, invasive mice that devour newborn chicks, and warming waters that stir up ferocious storms. That percentage has only risen, partly because key ocean habitats lie beyond any national jurisdiction, so no country feels obligated to stop the decline.

BirdLife International is now reviewing their map of vital ocean areas, analyzing where seabirds spend the most time so that ornithologists can maximize their resources, and it’s already clear that protecting the Tasman Sea – where ships from New Zealand, Taiwan, China, Spain, and more countries trawl for tuna – is a must for the survival of Antipodean albatrosses and many others.

So many Antipodean mothers die in the Tasman’s fishing nets that there are now two males for every female, and yet Borrelle is not without grounded hope. She helped hound the New Zealand government into requiring commercial fishing vessels to use cameras so that crews don’t deploy illegal gear, and Antipodean albatrosses already appear to be slowing their rate of decline. If Borrelle can get more nations to stifle illegal fishing – the biggest threat to seabirds – then Antipodeans have a shot. She and Birdlife International will have tamed some of the world’s least law-abiding waters, laying down a blueprint to save seabirds across the globe.