Common murres show small signs of a comeback from Gulf of Alaska to the Bering Sea

By RENEE GROSS • 6 HOURS AGO

Common murres have had a few bad years. The unusual warm weather temperatures, known as the blob, dramatically shifted the availability of their food supply in the Gulf of Alaska, starving thousands of birds to death. And most murres stopped breeding. But there is some good news. A small amount of baby murres are hatching again in colonies from the Gulf of Alaska to the Bering Sea.

It’s not unusual for common murres to have die-offs. But Heather Renner, a supervisory biologist at the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, said the die-off a few years ago was unprecedented.

“There's about two or three million common murres in Alaska and we don't know exactly how many died during the big die-off of 2015 to 2016, but probably about 500,000,” she said.

Renner said it’s clear the warm weather temperatures from 2014 through the beginning of 2017 were responsible for starving thousands of common murres. The sudden change in temperature led to fewer fish for the murres to eat and there are a couple theories as to why:

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Shifting bird distribution indicates a changing Arctic

Posted on June 28, 2016 by Vetscite

Shifts in the distribution of Spectacled Eiders, a predatory bird at the top of the Bering Sea’s benthic food web, indicate possible changes in the Arctic’s marine ecosystem, according to new research in The Condor: Ornithological Applications.

Matt Sexson of the USGS Alaska Science Center and his colleagues compared recent satellite telemetry data from molting eiders with data from the mid-1990s. They found that in two of the species’ four primary molting areas, the birds have shifted their range significantly in the intervening decades, and the researchers interpret this as an indicator of ecosystem change–eiders go where their prey is, and their movements could indicate big changes in the community of bottom-dwelling, cold-water-dependent invertebrates they eat.

It’s easier to track marine predators than it is to track their prey, explains Sexson. “It’s tough to speculate on the connection with climate change because the data are so sparse, but we know that the north Pacific is changing,” he says. “There’s a lot of corresponding evidence that together all says something big is happening here, and eiders provide a readily available indicator that changes are occurring.”

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Disease kills hundreds of seabirds in Alaska

Saturday December 7, 2013 7:00 PM

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — A disease has killed hundreds of seabirds on an island in the Bering Sea — the first documented outbreak in the state.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game says avian cholera is to blame for the birds found dead on the beaches of St. Lawrence Island, 200 miles from the mainland. The Anchorage Daily News reports (http://is.gd/yXJOYK ) that while the disease is common elsewhere, including in California, Nevada and Texas, this is the first confirmed outbreak in Alaska.

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A far-off place, all for the birds

HALL ISLAND — On this windy, misty August day, there are perhaps one million birds clinging to the cliffs that buttress this Bering Sea island. These seabirds, crazy-eyed and with bodies both sleek and clumsy, need solid ground for just a few months to hold their eggs. When their summer mission is complete, the birds scatter to the vastness of the sea.

The temporary human population on Hall Island is six — five biologists and me. We are intruding on a five-mile-long apostrophe occupied by birds in summer and padded upon year-round by a few arctic foxes that eat voles and birds and bird eggs and who-knows-what in winter. The only signs of people here are a collection of small World War II-era batteries on the interior tundra and a dark green square of turf that might show where a few Russians and their Aleut slaves dug in for a winter in the early 1800s.

Read more:  http://newsminer.com/bookmark/20562307-A-far-off-place-all-for-the-birds