This happened:
I have not seen a diary on this yet. Surely, one more cannot hurt. When it comes to birds, I'm something less than an amateur. My relationship with them is to look upon them with warm amazement and awe and if possible, to offer adulation.
In the daily rough and tumble of life, we have a more myopic and inward gaze at our lives and the world around us. At least that’s true for me. However, I noticed something recently – some mortality events.
The Common Murre (Uria aalge) is a seabird and lives along the North American coastlines. It lives in low-Arctic range and boreal waters in the North-Atlantic and North Pacific. It spends most of its time at sea, only coming to land to breed on rocky cliff shores or islands.
The Murre are awkward on land but have strong wings which allows them to dive deep, up to 600 feet to hunt for fish. They prefer to keep their dives to 250 feet though and the deeper dive would be to find food.
They huddle and nest on precipices and synchronize laying single light bulb shaped eggs (pyriform) which don’t generally fall off because they roll around like a light bulb or a pear.
They usually spend the winter off shore, diving for fish, mollusks and crustaceans. An average adult individual Murre can eat 30% of its body weight a day and an on average they weigh about 2 pounds. There are around 2.8 million Murres in Alaska.
A few days ago 8,000 of them were found dead, washed ashore, on Whittier Beach, Prince William Sound, Alaska.
Scouting teams have gone out and found that the die off count is closer to 12,000. That’s just the findings on the beaches of Prince William Sound. That is one location.
Seabird biologist, David Irons found some of them:
It was pretty horrifying," Irons said. "The live ones standing along the dead ones were even worse.
Due to their being in an emaciated condition, the conjecture is that the birds had starved to death. The migratory bird expert with the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service in Anchorage, Rob Kaler said:
We know what’s going on. We just don’t know why – the mechanism to indicate why are they starving.
While NOAA has not made any direct connections between warm waters and dead seabirds and marine animals, there has been an uptick in appearances of dead whales in Kodiak, Katmai and False Pass over the summer of 2015. There have been reports of dead Murre showing up in Cold Bay and Sitka in July, 2015. There have been dead sea lions and dead seabirds along the gulf and dead fish like herring and sand lances.
The first reports of dead birds washing up on shores were at Steward, Resurrection Bay, in March of 2015. Recent decades have seen many such events of dead Murre’s washing up on Alaska’s shores. However, this time the mass death seem more geographically widespread. Apparently, people have been looking for answers ever since the dead, starved Murre’s began to show up on Alaska’s coasts and even as far inland as Fairbanks and Denali. Heather Renner, a supervisory biologist at the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, estimates that something like 100,000 common Murres may have died and saying:
It's hard to know how many birds have died because Alaska is so big, and there are so many remote areas.
Finding Murre as far north as Fairbanks and Denali is quite unusual. Dan Gibson, Fairbanks based avian expert:
[...] This is still way, way off the charts,” he said. “There’s nothing that I’ve heard about or read about that parallels this.
Seabird die offs are not uncommon. They do happen. In 1989 nearly 190,000 died when Exxon Valdez crashed and a million gallons of oil spilled out into the waters. There was one in 1993 and one in 1997. The latter was during an El Nino and many different birds were also affected. The conjecture and focus then was also on warming waters and starvation. This die off feels different to the investigating biologists because it has been going on for year and covers a vast area. They are linking it to warmer waters. In 2008, a study was done which correlated die offs to rising ocean temperatures:
Murre prey such as capelin, a forage fish in the smelt family, live in a narrow band of cool water, said Irons, who retired last year after 36 years with the Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska and California.
If the water (temperature) goes above that threshold, they're out of there," Irons said. "They either die or they move.
Are the die offs actually increasing or is it just the attention which is increasing?
There is not a good database to answer that. There is this, and some specialists are getting their cohorts together to put together a database. Understanding the cause of the die offs is salient to finding out if it involves diseases or toxins in the feeding areas. Or it may, also, involve climate change or weather as additional stressors. Understanding why they are dying helps acquire a better picture of the natural system involving seabirds, their prey and their relationship to that offshore blob of warm water:
Water temperatures in 2015 were above average and biologists detected signs of trouble. Murres usually found on the outer continental shelf began to show up near shore, including a Juneau boat harbor where they competed with sea lions for herring.
Murre’s have a capacity for rebound as was evident in Russia and Norway in 1984 and 1985 when they nearly disappeared due to overfishing in the Barents Sea. Rebound has also been documented on Channel Island National Park.
The washed up bodies has prompted action from the National Wildlife Health Center. The center is very like a CDC for wildlife and assesses impact of disease on wildlife. The deaths have not abated in the last few weeks and Murre have been seen in groups, floating and exhibiting lethargy along with very little avoidance behavior. This prompted the USGS to call for research into their mass deaths.
The bulletin said:
Further research is needed to determine if potential impacts of recent unprecedented warm ocean temperatures may be affecting seabird prey distribution or abundance.