Birds and Climate Change: The Alaskan Common Murre Die Off of 2016

Photo Credit: Tamara Zeller, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

I was privileged to work as a volunteer at the avian rehabilitation clinic in Anchorage Alaska, The Bird Treatment and Learning Center.  Among the various daily activities of incoming and outgoing birds that are treated for various natural and unnatural conditions it was brought to my attention that hundreds of Common Murres were taken in less than a few weeks during January 2016.  This event is now known as the Common Murre die off of 2016, where an overall estimated number of 100,000* birds were found ashore dead over a nine month period where a majority of those occurred during the winter.  The photo above illustrates how massive of a die off this was, however to imagine 7,800* birds on just over 1 mile of beach is horrific.  Imagine the shock to see and (perhaps) smell such a thing! What might have caused these birds to be washed up onto the shore dead from starvation?  The theories are present, but scientists are still evaluating the possibilities.

As in any case like this one must evaluate what is known, in order to begin to formulate more questions to find answers to.  A few days after I was told about this massive die off and the immense effort that the clinic had put into tube feeding hundreds of birds in a short amount of time, I took a train to the Alaska Sea Life Center where I went behind the scenes to view the care and treatment areas for their captive sea birds.  While I was there I was able to view the Common Murres playfully diving deep down to the bottom of their aquariums, and I pondered the daily life and acquisition of food that the birds go through. A Common Murres are pelagic (living most of their lives on water) and has a diving range of 600 ft where it must gather and eat 40 to 50% of its body weight in order to survive.  One of the theories states that the increase in water temperatures from what is known as "the blob" which is an unusually warm mass of water moving along the Pacific coast of North America. The higher than normal temperatures cause a variety of normal ocean life processes to be altered.

Let me draw you a picture.  Imagine you are a small fish that prefers to live closer to the shore in water that is particularly cool at about 500 ft.  This is also the ideal place to survive and spawn creating more offspring to contribute to future generations.  Suddenly a massive warm "blob" moves in, subject to the forces of ENSO (El Nino Sourthern Oscillation), which means the only way you can find cooler water for your immediate survival is to swim deeper -- say 700 to 800 ft.  Your whole world just shifted into an area where other new predators, and environmental challenges exist, but it was your only choice!  That being said, it remains this way for just over two years, and if you don't reproduce within two years your chances of having babies is over, and the overall population of your species declines.  Good thing you are not a species that is threatened or endangered!

Lets look at another part of this equation. The small schooling fish I mentioned above (no name in particular, there are many this could apply to), are the food source for the Common Murre. Remember that the bird can only dive down to 600 ft!  Well, what do you do when your food is forced to move out to 700 - 800 ft? You starve, and eventually die.

If this was not bad enough news, there was a storm that swept through in January producing high winds and if you are a pelagic bird (again, living life out on the ocean), it takes an incredible amount of energy in order to keep afloat, to move about trying your darndest to capture the food that is too deep to capture.  In a frantic desparity, you take to the Eastern wind and fly inland disoriented and hoping to find a food source but you run out of energy, land in places where you are now rendered immobile because your legs are situated so far towards your rump you can not walk on the frozen areas you have landed on. This would describe those birds that were strangely found off of the areas on the shoreline.

All of the pieces and parts to this story summarize the need to be aware of climate factors and how they impact the survival of various species.  More so....what is it that we humans are doing to accidental cause negative environmental disruptions.  The end of this story concludes without a definitive answer, but yet a need for heightened awareness to climate matters and some of the chain reactions in our environment that are caused by the humans....their consumption of resources and production of waste.  To date, scientists are unaware of the exact cause of the die off, but the fact is that this occurrence is not the only of its kind.

Soon I will be interviewed regarding this matter and will discuss more about its connection to climate change.  Stay tuned!

*Numbers provided by the US Fish and Wildlife Service