April 26, 2008: Seabird Ecology and Conservation in Washington · 28 April 2008, 05:17 by Julie Loyd
Present: 19 adults, 6 children.
Peter Hodum is Assistant Professor at University of Puget Sound and a director at Oikonos. His current projects are on Protection and Tatoosh islands with Rhinocerous Auklets and Tufted Puffins. He also works on long-term conservation on Juan Fernandez Island 400 miles off the coast of Chile.
Nathalie Hamel is a PhD candidate at University of Washington who grew up in Quebec. She’s studying murre bycatch in local fisheries and is involved with the projects on Protection and Tatoosh.
Seabird life history: Seabirds tend to be long-lived, some of them live 60 – 70 years, or possibly longer. It takes several years for them to begin breeding, and then they have low egg laying rates. Cormorants lay the largest clutches at 5, but most seabirds lay 1 to 2. Most can’t replace lost eggs. Most seabirds are colonial nesters such as gulls, auklets, and Pigeon Guillemots. The range of habitat is from nearshore (murre) to oceanic (albatross).
Overall, seabirds are opportunistic feeders. They might eat plankton, squid, fish. Some specialize, some are generalist. Some dive, some are surface feeders. Many are highly migratory, even those with “challenged flight styles.” Rhinocerous auklets move from here to California, for example.
Seabirds are found in all of the world’s oceans. Some species, like the gulls, can be terrestrial as well as marine. Many are marine animals. Murres, puffins, Pigeon guillemots, and the tubenoses (albatross, petrel, shearwaters) may spend years at sea and only come to shore when they are old enough to breed. On land, they’re often clumsy.
Shapes and forms are diverse, a function of their ecology. Pigeon guillemots are divers, so they look stubby. Albatrosses soar, with long wings. Bills also are differentiated.
Seabirds as indicators: They tend to be top-level predators, thus integrating the trophic levels below them. That is, they depend on all the prey that lies below on the trophic chain. If they eat salmon, they are dependent on what salmon are dependent on.
They are responsive to change and tend to breed in good years. Because they’re long-lived, they will abandon breeding attempts in undesirable years or places. A white-crowned sparrow will put all of its efforts into its one breeding attempt, because chances are it won’t live to breed again, but a seabird likely won’t. The costs of breeding and tending a nest are great.
Seabirds can be used to track changes in the marine environment. Their response to change depends on their life-history; they might be adaptive, able to buffer changes, or they may be more specialized.
How we study Seabirds: On-colony is the usual, since doing anything at sea used to be very costly. There, one can look at population size, survival, reproduction, provisioning (diet). At sea, one can look at foraging and migration. Technology has changed enough so that this is more possible: VHF transmitters, satellite transmitters, Geolocation tags on JFPE (Juan Fernandez). Using geolocation tags, they’ve tracked Sooty shearwaters. The birds cover the entire Pacific basin, 20,000 to 25,000 miles, in about six months. They’re called the “endless summer” birds.
In southern latitudes, there are incredible bursts of productivity in the summer, then it drops precipitously. The Sooty shearwaters go north, rocket through the equatorial areas, and then hang out in the northern summers. The Pink-footed shearwaters might winter off Peru. Others went from Ecuador to the southern tip of Baja in about four days, spending their summer off the North American Pacific Coast. How did that evolve? Nobody knows.
Forces Shaping Seabird Populations: Bottom up: driven by oceanography and food availability. Top down: predation, human impacts. Other forces: Introduced species on islands, for seabirds, is the greatest problem. Gulls, terns, cormorants evolved in the presence of terrestrial predators, but most nesting seabirds don’t recognize predators (rats, mice, cats, pigs, foxes). Habitat destruction – the word “pristine” no longer has meaning anywhere. Plastics are serious. Albatrosses in Hawaii bring their babies plastic to eat, although there are no humans within 1,000 miles or more. Oil contamination. Fisheries: thousands of birds attend fishing boats, waiting for the discards. They can be caught in nets, hooks, or get caught in lines. For certain types of fisheries and certain types of seabirds, it can be devastating. For albatrosses, fisheries are the greatest cause of their decline world-wide.
Seabirds in Washington: We have eighteen breeding species in summer, and more than a hundred non-breeders that overwinter or migrate. That diversity declines after the migratory season.
NOAA, DFW, research Universities, and many others oversee this area, but seabirds are astoundingly poorly studied in the state of Washington. There is no overarching vision. Nathalie and Peter will have to start with first principles at an agency meeting in a week, “why do we want to study seabirds?”
Why, then? Seabirds tell us a lot. They know where food should be (that’s why they compete with fisheries). There’s an incredible biomass of seabirds in the Sound. The most common bird in Washington are Sooty Shearwaters which breed in New Zealand. We usually get upwelling on the outer coast where they summer. In the Puget Sound there’s freshwater input, creating productivity. NOAA maps show chlorophyll, which is almost always tied to zooplankton and fish productivity. (Some seabirds specialize in low productivity zones, though).
Local Birds: Fork-tailed storm-petrels, Leach’s storm-petrels, Cassin’s auklet, Rhinoceros auklet, Common murre, Pigeon guillemot, Tufted puffins, Marbled murrelets, Pelagic cormorants, Doble-crested cormorants, Brandt’s cormorants, Glaucous-winged western gulls, et al. (the more we learn about gulls, the more humble we get. Glaucous-winged hybridize with Western gulls here. Westerns are found in CA, Glaucous-winged further north).
The WA coast has USFWS National Wildlife Refuges: Smith, Protection Islands, Flattery Rocks, Quillayute Needles, Copalis. Not even researchers can step on the refuges out on the coast.
Local Seabirds: Black-footed albatross, Laysan albatross, Short-tailed albatross (thought-to have been extinct), sooty shearwater, Short-tailed shearwater, etc.
Winter marine birds flood the outer coast and Puget Sound: Rhinoceros auklets, Common murres, Pigeon guillemots, Pelagic cormorants, Loons, Grebes, Scoters, Ducks, Gulls.
Oddly, it’s less diverse here in summer because only 18 species breed here.
Questions:
Smell? A lot of diving birds have sealed nares and can’t smell.
Echolocation? No evidence. Common murres can dive to a record of 150 – 175 meters, or more commonly, 70 meters, where there is “no” light.
Navigation? Petrels, shearwaters, and albatrosses leave the burrow/island as a fledgeling. They tend to come back to the same island when they are 7, 8, or 9 years old, after that many years out at sea. They may use magnetic or celestial orientation. Not well understood.
Are there nations that are responsible for more fisheries deaths? The good thing, is that fisheries deaths are a solvable technical issue. Ed Melvin at U of W at Washington Sea Grant, has had remarkable success in Alaska, WA, and South America. Long line fishing does hook a lot of birds, and is getting a lot of attention; US, Japanese, Taiwanese, especially in the North Pacific. In Southern oceans are other fleets with other gear. A lot of times it happens in open waters with no oversight. Our fisheries operate on the honor system.
Upwellings? They happen along the edges of continents, typically the eastern boundary of an ocean basin; here and in Southern Africa (benguela current), not as pronounced on western boundaries like the East Coast or Japan. When living matter sinks down to the cold, dense layer, they move with undersea currents. As the currents move, they get deflected by undersea features. At the coasts, winds pull water offshore, which pulls the undersea currents up, which feed the biomass.
Puget Sound seabird status (Nathalie): The Puget Sound is beautiful with clear water, but it is not healthy. Recent headlines show decline of salmon in the area, herring, marine life, wildlife, unexplained seabird deaths
Read the State of the Sound 2007 by the Puget Sound Action Team on that subject. Their report card for seabirds is at the danger zone. Populations have declined by 1/4 to 1/2: 90% Western Grebe, 57% Scoter and other scoter declines are well documented. Others: Mallards, etc. Some have increased: Harlequin Ducks, Double-crested Cormorants. And finally, there are species for which information conflicts: Pigeon Guilemonts, Double-crested Cormorants, Rhinocerous Auklets (decreased on colonies, increased on water). Pigeon Guillemots. They count birds at colonies and out on the water. Marble Murrelets seem stable, though they declined since the ’70’s.
Why do some birds decline and others increase? We don’t know. Where is it happening? – Puget Sound? Breeding grounds? During migration?
Western Grebes spend a few months in northern BC and Alaska, breeding, and possibly that’s where the decline is happening. Prey availablity, distribution and abundance? There are about six Bald eagle nests on this island. They are important predators on colonies, and can cause significant disturbance.
Loss of habitat, coastal disturbance – how do you quantify that?
Contaminants – affect eggshell thickness and overall health.
Fishing gear and fishing practices. Ghost nets that have sunk to the bottom hold a lot of bones; they are still fishing even though they are not being operated. There is also bycatch, in this area by gillnets.
Case study
Common Murres Uria aalga on Tatoosh Island: Murres have declined drastically in the early 1980’s in Washington. In 1979 the colony count were about 30,000, there was a drastic decline in 1983, when there was a big El Niño. Now there are about 5,000. El Niño: Changes in the water temperature and winds around the Equator changes our area. With warm water temperatures, the upwelling that usually fuels the food web stops and the loss of nutrients kill off the prey and hence the predators.
But why, after the precipitous decline in that El Niño year, have Murres not recovered?
There are ten times as many nesting in Oregon; the increase we see in summer is an influx from Oregon.
Murres are vulnerable to bycatch. It can lead to pupulation decline, food web disruption, and ethical reasons – it’s a waste.
Fisheries gear that is risky includes nets. Birds get caught. Purse seiners can catch birds in the purse. Longliners have bait that catches birds as well as salmon. Trawlers catch birds in their cables.
The interaction depends on the birds’ foraging strategy. Murres and Puffins, Northern Fulmars will pick fish eggs and squids off the surface.
Here, we have coastal drift gillnet fisheries. WA tribal, non-tribal. BC. They have nets 1/2 km long, set for a couple hours at a time, day or night. Net size is 5 – 7 inches diagonally.
Are Common Murres vulnerable to this kind of fishing? Tatoosh Island is the closest breeding island to the fishing grounds. Gillnet bycatch studies show common murres and rhinoceros auklets being caught, 70% of them murres. Fisheries are in Barkley Sound, Willapa Bay, Juan de Fucka, Puget Sound. Nathalie decided to follow the birds using radio transmitters, since salvaged birds from fishing boats can’t be identified as to origin. For three summers, she followed them in a plane from AK to OR and into the Sound. The signal cones upwards, so the higher up the further the range. At 2,000 feet she could hear about 15 – 20 km. On the outer shore, higher up, she could hear 40 km.
Tatoosh has bats and humans but no other mammals. River otters occasionally come to eat eggs but sea otters don’t come on land. Bald Eagles are the main disturbance.
Before Aug 15, most of the birds hang around the breeding grounds. After Aug 15, they dispersed out from the island, most going east into the Puget Sound, overlapping where the gillnet fisheries are. 80% of Tatoosh birds overlapped fisheries, inshore August – September. About 4,000 murres were therefore vulnerable. But we don’t know what the death rate is. Studies from the mid-90’s show thousands of birds getting caught in the nets, about 2500. This is a substantial percentage of what is found on Tatooshn.
Fishermen take the birs out of the net and throw them overboard. The Kitsap Sun, reported one beach collected 200 birds. Necropsies looked for fluid in the lungs, lesions on the skins, showing that they drowned in nets. What to do? Shutting down gillnets is not being discussed, rather changing the gear.
Fisheries-caused beachings data was collected by volunteers. Beached Bird Survey of BC covers 87 beaches, COASST in WA covers 151 beaches. All those data go into a centralized data base. What are the species that show up and at what rate?
There were 18 fisheries-caused beachings in the last four decades, involving 2,347 birds, with 378 birds in the worst one at Boundary Bay, gleaned from a variety of data bases. The citizen science baseline surveys, 1991 of them, show that there are a maximum of 15 birds ever found at any beach. The mean for a fisheries disaster is 20 birds/km, for baseline is .07 birds/km. These occur during Aug and November with the peak in August, WHICH is when they migrate. Fishing season is June – December. Over 90% were Common murres, also cormorants, grebes, gulls, loons, etc, while in the baseline study they were not disproportionally represented.
Solution #1: Time of day closures, should save some Rhinoceros Auklets and Common Murres; they are caught more at dawn and dusk, possibly worse at night, esp. Western Grebes. Cons: fishers want to maximize their time. At midday they compete with purse seiners.
Solution #2: Modify the net by making it more visible to the birds. This reduces seabird bycatch by 50%, with no impact on the target fish catch. Cons: Cost, inconvenience.
Washington bycatch mitigation: Non tribal, adopted in 1999: To fish for sockeye, you need to fish during daytime with a white mesh net. Downside: Non tribal only, and sockeye are only a minor part of the fisheries.
Summary: The Murres from Tatoosh are vulnerable to fisheries. The problem persists despite the declining fisheries and the mitigation. Some fishermen are not interested in sharing bycatch data, since they are afraid of the fishery being shut down.
Keeping track of Seabirds with citizen science: Observe birds at colonies. Whidbey Island Pigeon Guilemot surveys: How many, where nesting, what eating? Guillemots, puffins, rhinoceros auklets all come to the surface, with a fish in their bill. With binoculars you can ID the fish. With Guilemots they’re gunnels, prickleback, greenlings, anything that lives in nearshore rocky bottoms. They hug the shores.
You can count birds from the coast. Seattle Audubon has just started a pilot project. Volunteers go to the same site every month with binoculars and count for a 1/2 hour.
You can count dead birds.
Monitoring: On colony, at sea.
It has been shown that one circuit of an island to look for tufted Puffin nests is sufficient to find them, using the proper protocol. Outer Coast, Protection, Smith, etc, have been done. Would want to do more than one year.
Winnie: moved here in ’77, on South end of Matia, Puffin Island, used to have puffins.
Glen: Someone should track forage fish population in the Puget Sound, what their densities are, do they correlate with the bird population?
Nathalie: The closest study is a scoter survey.
Peter: There’s herring surveys. There are short and limited forage fish surveys, but not comprehensive, even though they have commercial value. Seabirds can tell you a lot, as an upper trophic level. If you can sample the fish directly, you’re removing assumptions.
Glen: You look for the birds to tell you where the fish are. In ’96 there were thousands of seabirds on an unbelievable amount of sand lance, so many dogfish you could walk on them, in ’98, ’99, they were cleaned out. We didn’t see herring until ’04 or ’05. I think that’s what happened to the seabirds.
Peter: Given that you do beach seines, who knows where your fish monitoring is going to go?
Glen: Chinook drives it, we want to know it all. We can’t even buy the ethanol to preserve our data to save it for DNA.
Peter: You should find the right scientist match.
Nathalie: Collaboration is usual. Look to NOAA for forage fish.
Peter: Monitoring is only as good as the question that drives it. Think carefully about what you want to get out of the monitoring. Phenology – how variable is the timing?
Peter: Things are tuned to conditions. Richard Primack, conservation Biologist at Boston University, looks at climate change based on flowering plants in MA, going back to Thoreau’s journals of 153 species. That’s a 150 year data set. When do you first see pigeon guillemots? Try giving people a rationale and a checklist.
Hallie: You can see patterns from raw data collection.
Julie: Both and.
Peter: Ancillary data might lead to your second chapter of your dissertation. But at least generally, you already have an idea of what interests you. What do you want to know about seabirds? Think about what you want to know.
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