I found this dated March 18 2006:
Dying by the scores Seabirds washing ashore on Oregon beaches
By Elise Hamner, City Editor
BANDON - They've been washing up dead among the plastic bottles, styrofoam, wood and other junk in the driftline on South Coast beaches this month.
Hundreds of carcasses of rhinoceros auklets, possibly as many as 20 or 30 per mile, have been reported since Sunday. Some are just a jumble of bones or scrap of skin with a beak or legs attached. Those are the hard ones for people to identify.
“They start with the feet, because that's what's usually left of the carcass,” David Bilderback said.
He and his wife, Diane, squatted down Wednesday morning to show how they examine a dead bird to figure out what species it is. This was an obvious auklet. Nothing had been chewed away by bugs, gulls or other scavengers.
The Bilderbacks are members of the CoastWatch, a citizen beach monitoring group, and were lucky this morning as they strolled out onto the beach just south of Bandon. There was a minutes-brief break in the drizzle, gusty winds and ultimately pounding storms that have smashed into Oregon off and on for almost three months.
David pulled a brush typically used for painting trim out of his pocket and swept away sand grains from the bird's thick pile of breast feathers. Diane spread the auklet's toes to count the webs.
“We measure the length of the tarsus and the bill,” Diane said.
Some birds have three or four webs or toes on their feet. Others have specialized beaks, such as northern fulmars, with a tube nose that allows the seagoing birds to excrete salt since they don't come to shore for fresh water.
All are clues that people who monitor the miles and miles of Oregon's beaches use to identify and count the carcasses. These days it's a science. And the biologists are tracking their findings in this latest seabird die-off with interest.
Scrappers on the sea
“The questions in my mind are: Is this something that's widespread in Oregon? Is it a freak event like a storm or something that's going to last longer?” asked seabird researcher Dr. Julia Parrish, an associate professor of biology at the University of Washington.
Parrish was thinking through the possibilities as she talked Friday morning. She had been following reports to the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team, of which she's the executive director. She's been talking to people from Washington to California. There were no reports of an increase of dead auklets washing up on Washington's shores, nor in California. Populations at seabird colonies off San Francisco look normal at the start of breeding season.
“We have to use beached bird surveys as an indicator,” said Jan Hodder, associate professor of marine biology at Charleston's Oregon Institute of Marine Biology.
It's like a forensic investigation, really. During a fulmar die-off in November and December, Hodder sent off carcasses for study. Necropsies found those birds starved. With these auklets, beach volunteers say some have looked skinny, some haven't.
Rhinoceros auklets live most of their lives at sea. They are scrappy, constant flyers. They are deep divers. Their health can give clues about the health of the ocean's food chain.
The auklets look like little footballs, almost pointy on the ends, black on top and white underneath. Underwater, they swoop down to depths of 200 feet, snapping up small fish as they glide. In breeding season, they grow a horn of sorts - hence rhinoceros.
Most people have never seen them, except for maybe gawking at the pudgy auklets underneath the roof of nets in the sea bird aviary at the Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport.
Biologists estimate there are about 1,000 rhino auklets that breed in colonies off the coast of Oregon each spring. California supports about 2,000 breeders and 60,000 are off Washington, with hundreds of thousands more farther north, Hodder said. During nesting they tend to feed at night and they are ground burrowers, so it's really tough to study their nests.
Countless thousands likely winter in the waters off Oregon, though no one knows for sure how many because few folks venture tens and hundreds of miles onto the stormy Pacific for winter research.
And as to whether the die-off will be harmful, no one knows. Die-offs aren't necessarily rare.
In spring 2005, beachwatchers found dead seabirds, mostly cormorants and murres, at the rate of 8 per mile from Central California to British Columbia, Canada. Scientists put the blame on a warmer ocean and too little plankton and other food due to a lack of spring and summer ocean upwelling.
Feeling puny
Cold water off the Oregon Coast in summer is synonymous with rich feeding grounds. But scientists say ocean temperatures are rising. Last year, they were 2 or more degrees above normal off the West Coast, perhaps because of the lack of cold upwelling typically brought by summer winds.
“Possibly this is an indication of global climate change,” Hodder said.
Without upwellings, there are fewer plankton, the tiny plants and animals that swirl up to feed the hunger further up the food chain.
Bob Loeffel, a retired state marine fisheries manager, thinks that might be a clue. All the scientists who pay attention to seabirds know about Loeffel. He's hiked a 4.6-mile stretch of beach between Newport and Waldport since 1978. Every time he walks, he has one purpose in mind - to find dead seabirds and keep records. He found 45 rhino auks in the first 13 days of the month. It blew apart his record over the past 28 years that was for 13 dead ones for the entire month of March.
“This isn't a storm kind of incident. The birds we checked are very thin. At the time they first showed, there was no storm,” he said.
Ironically, he said, there aren't unusual numbers of other dead seabirds. Again, it's hard to know, though, how many bodies actually make it to shore. When they do, tiny ones like the 2-ounce storm petrels tend to get swallowed by gulls in one gulp.
Maybe this rhinoceros auklet die-off is related to last summer's seabird die-offs, Loeffel surmised. Last spring, he said, was different from any year before that he could recall. Salmon were scarce. Seabirds were dying.
“I think there's a lot of questions yet to be answered about last summer,” Loeffel said.
Crashing the party
Here's where the science comes in.
The answers might hinge on whether these are young birds. Maybe the birds weren't able to get enough energy to survive the winter.
Had the die-off been in a limited area with a wider variety of species, it could point to harmful algae blooms, Dr. Parrish said.
Since it's only one species, that could make the investigation more complicated - or maybe not. In March, the rhinoceros auklets start to assemble offshore in larger and larger groups.
“You can think of it like early evening at a singles bar,” Parrish said. “Everybody is kind of checking everybody out and looking for what will happen.”
And something may have happened all right, during that pre-mating season excitement.
Maybe it was the onslaught of a raging storm that forced the auklets to swim up and down 30-foot ocean swells in 50 mile-per-hour winds day into night.
“This may be one of those weird events where the birds are congregating ... and maybe a storm event killed off some of them,” Parrish said.
If that was the case, the rhinoceros auklet die-off might go down in history as just a blip on a graph.
http://www.theworldlink.com/article...ews01031806.txt
the more perspectives, the stronger the thread.
