Observation: On Monday, a community member contacted me about birds on the beach. As I went down, I found at least 10 dead birds on the beach. Some look like Mag Pies and some look like Seagulls, but I'm not sure as they were all skull and feathers. Dead birds on the beaches of Alaska has been happening a lot and we weren't sure why.
Consult: Julia writes: "It looks to me like all of these carcasses are murres. You can tell by the white-tipped secondaries (inside stiff flight feathers) and white underwing linings. There is also one shot of a head with the dark, smooth, pointed bill typical of the large Alcids (murres and guillemots). All of the carcasses look to have been on the beach for awhile – they are well-scavenged, and also have that weathered look (bones are completely clean and scoured, carcasses are tangled in dried seaweed).
Since may 2015, beaches throughout AK, and particularly in the gulf of Alaska, have seen common murres washing up on them. The pattern of beaching has been odd. Early in the season, we saw lots of murres, perhaps hundreds in a single kilometer, wash up in individual locations, essentially big spikes in space. The timing was quite worrisome, as may is at the start of the breeding season for murres in the gulf. Suffice to say these spikes were indicators that the 2015 was going to be stressful, which it was – almost all of the murre colonies in the gulf had miserable breeding and many failed. As the breeding season progressed into fall, the average beaching rate of murres increased – more beaches throughout the gulf saw murres, and the phenomena spread out of the gulf into the Aleutians and into the Bering Sea. By the turn of the year, there were many murres rafting up in Prince William Sound (which is totally unusual) and winter storms drove thousands of carcasses to shore. At this time, people also began to report murres flying over the Kenai and the Alaska Peninsulas, and settling on rivers and lakes. I don’t believe this behavior has been observed by western science. It would be very interesting to know whether there are community records or stories about murres inland.
The COASST program, which collects monthly information on seabirds washing ashore on beaches through AK (and the lower 48 west coast), has seen an annual beaching rate of murres that is 150 times normal in the gulf of AK. That’s a huge difference and it adds up to many tens of thousands of murres.
There are many thoughts about why the murres are dying, and why they are behaving so abnormally. These include the possibility that the birds have been affected by poisons (domoic acid, saxitoxin) as a consequence of harmful algal blooms and food-chain magnification. Another is that the warmer than usual north pacific (has been this way since 2013; known in science and popular circles as “the blob”) has caused fundamental shifts in where forage fish (herring, smelt, sandlance) are. Some scientists are thinking that the fish may be deeper because they are seeking colder water. So, the birds have to work harder to get the fish – diving deeper takes energy. And this pushes many birds beyond their ability to sustain themselves.
To me, all of this speaks to major shifts in the ecosystem, and this eco-disaster has been echoed by other major beaching events in the lower 48, including hundreds of thousands of cassin’s auklets (a krill-feeding relative of the murres) in "2013-14."
