Kim Nelson, a wildlife biologist from OSU and one of the lead investigators, arranges instruments necessary to perform an onboard surgery: calipers, pliers, needles, thread, rulers, a small steel band. Then she leans back in her chair and closes her eyes. She has been on the water since 6:00 p.m., and has no qualms about getting a little more rest before the marbled murrelet comes aboard. As dictated by their permit, her team will have just under an hour to extract the little seabird\u2019s story via measurements, blood samples, a leg band, and a radio tag. The minutes will be precious with the rare and secretive bird\u2014one that, despite decades of intensive and expensive interventions, has so far seemed to resist all efforts to be saved.<\/p>\n
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![\"A](\"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/nest-marbled-murrelets.jpg\")
<\/a>Marbled murrelets are unusual among seabirds in that they nest in trees. This chick calls from its nest, a bed of moss, in an Oregon forest. Photo by Mark Moffett\/Minden Pictures<\/p><\/div>\n
Marbled murrelets are dove-sized seabirds that range along the North American coast from southeastern Alaska to Northern California. They forage in marine waters, usually within a few kilometers of shore, diving for schooling fish such as sand lance, anchovy, or herring. Like puffins or murres, their close relatives, they are characterized by a stubbiness of body and wing. Unlike puffins or murres, they do not form breeding colonies, nesting nowhere near rocky headlands or islands.<\/p>\n
But where murrelets nested was known to scientists only in bits and pieces for almost 200 years after the species was first described in 1789. Then in 1974, a tree surgeon climbed an enormous Douglas fir in California. Peering over a branch 45 meters off the ground, he saw a downy murrelet chick staring back, and realized he\u2019d found the home of a bird often called the enigma of the Pacific.<\/p>\n
Marbled murrelets lay their eggs on mossy beds among the broad upper limbs of old-growth conifers. But they are not alone in their preference for tall, ancient trees in North America\u2019s coastal temperate rainforests. These western forests have been harvested widely and with the trees went the murrelets. Following steep population declines in the wake of logging, the species was listed as threatened in British Columbia under the Species at Risk Act in 1990. Two years later, it was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in California, Oregon, and Washington.<\/p>\n
It was partially with the murrelets\u2019 dire straits in mind that broad restrictions were placed on old-growth logging across 9.7 million hectares of federal land in the United States under the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan; individual states also curtailed the harvest on their lands to a lesser extent. In British Columbia, more than a quarter of nearly two million remaining hectares of suitable murrelet nesting habitat is on protected land.<\/p>\n
But the murrelets\u2019 numbers haven\u2019t climbed in response. The combined California, Oregon, and Washington population, with fewer than 20,000 individuals, continues to decline by as much as four percent per year. In British Columbia, where there may be closer to 100,000 murrelets, the population is declining by 1.6 percent per year. Even in Alaska, home to the greatest number of murrelets, scientists believe the population has declined by 71 percent since the 1990s, from around one million birds down to 270,000.<\/p>\n
Concerned that more could be done for the murrelet in Oregon, conservation groups petitioned the state department of fish and wildlife in June 2016 to upgrade the species from threatened to endangered. While the recent petition compels Nelson and her team\u2019s work in part, at the root they are struggling with a problem that has bedeviled researchers for almost 30 years, as they try to determine what it\u2019s going to take to slow the murrelets\u2019 decline. Or perhaps even reverse it.<\/p>\n
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The Zodiac pulls alongside the Pacific Storm<\/em> and someone passes over what looks like a blue to-go container. Strung through the handle is a stopwatch, started a few moments after the murrelet was captured. Technician Jennifer Rothe takes the box. \u201cCome here, you,\u201d she says softly, pulling out the murrelet, which nips at her. The bird fits easily in her hand and she gently pins the wings down with her fingers. Its plumage is subtle, a mottled gray and brown; its eyes dark and shining.<\/p>\n A researcher snips a breast feather from a marbled murrelet aboard the RV Pacific Storm<\/em>. The feather will be used to determine what the murrelet was eating prior to the breeding season. Photo by Eric Wagner<\/p><\/div>\n Nelson starts processing quickly. She and Rothe, working by headlamp and whispering to keep the bird calm, note the state of its plumage, attach a steel ID band to its leg, measure its wing and bill, and then slip it into a cloth bag for weighing. The bird, likely a male, is 220 grams\u2014a little less than two sticks of butter. It\u2019s lighter than Nelson would like, but heavy enough for a VHF tag.<\/p>\n By the time Nelson hands the bird to the tagging team, 25 minutes have passed.<\/p>\n Nelson is in her late 50s, with long, wavy hair that, like her research subject, is a mix of gray and brown. She has studied marbled murrelets for almost 40 years, and in 1990, found the first active murrelet nest in Oregon. She is modest about that achievement. \u201cI happened to be standing in the right place at the right time,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Only 30 active nests have been found in the state since then, along with 40 or so inactive nests. (To compare, researchers have found more than 200 nests in British Columbia.) \u201cYou can\u2019t draw a lot of firm conclusions from only 70 records,\u201d Nelson says, but finding nests is still a challenge. Murrelets breed anywhere from three to 80 kilometers inland. They travel to and from their nests only at dawn and dusk. Their flight is direct and fast, around 70 kilometers per hour. \u201cIt\u2019s literally blink-and-you\u2019ve-missed-it,\u201d Nelson says. Once on their nest high in the canopy, the birds are silent.<\/p>\n It is to bypass these complications that the OSU team has taken to the Pacific in the Pacific Storm <\/em>on this night in early May. For the past week, weather permitting, they have been at sea from 6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. At twilight, capture teams motor off to search for murrelets, which drift on the water singly or in pairs.<\/p>\n<\/a>
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