Life on the Outer Coast

Thursday Michelle Kissling from the USFWS ( Juneau) came over to talk about the research she has been doing on Kittlitiz's murrelets. USFWS is funding the research because this bird is in serious decline and is a candidate species. If I remember right the numbers have been declining in the order of 84%.
This murrelet is another of the deviant seabirds, in that it doesn't nest in colonies. Unlike the marbled murrelet, this one nests on the ground. According to Michelle the current estimate for the two species divergence is around 1 million years.
The population that is the focus of Michelle's research lives in Icy Bay. It sounds like the gap in population estimates for the murrelets is the area between Glacier Bay and Prince William Sound. If I remember correctly she and her field crew spends most of June through August in Icy Bay.
They captured birds for radio tagging using a spot light and a dip net. This of course happens at night in the early summer. From what she said it took them a couple of seasons to find out where the birds congregated at night and how to capture them effectively. The first year they captured one bird (I wish that the Edgecumbe students had heard that bit of reality), 14 in 2006 and I believe 38 2007. Two volunteers from Sitka spend a week in the bay to help with the capturing each year. Apparently, they are getting pretty good at it, sounds like 2 birds per dip wasn't unusual. Each bird was weighed, measured had blood drawn and feathers removed before being fitted with a raido transmitter. Sounds like the weso operation I witnessed last spring. They flew regular transects to locate the tagged birds in order to look at where they were feeding and in hope of locateding nests as only 25 nests had been found prior to this summer.

Four nests were located, Michelle was noticably thrilled about this achievement. One nest was located below a hanging glacier on a cliff, presumbably in a crevice. A group of Swiss who were skiing on Mt. St. Elias donated the use of their helicopter to Michelle , so that she could try to find a spot to land and find the nest. They gave it a try, but the pilot couldn't find a spot to put down.
The second nest they found was on the Malaspina glacier on a layer of rock debris about 1.5ft thick. They tracked the parent to the nest with the plane several times, then the parent didn't return for 5 days. The hike to the nest site sounded rather challenging, but they found it, but the parent had abandoned the nest. The egg was there, but cold with condensation on the surface. Michelle was reluctant to recover the egg at that point, but did so at the end of the season. They did a necropsy in Anchorage and so far haven't found anything obviously amiss with the chick. With each nest site they do a habitat survey (I didn't hear what data they collect). When they investigated the site, they found several old nests within the habitat survey. There were pieces of egg shell, feathers, and in one remains of a chick all several years old. Michelle is hoping that this means that they can return and find another nest next season. Hopefully more successful.
The third nest found was a successful one. It was a recently (not sure how long) dusty looking small boulder field about 8 miles away from the fiord. Again, it was great to hear how thrilled Michelle was to find a nest with a bird on an egg. They packed in a video camera set-up with a 150ft coax cable so that they could record the comings and goings of the birds. The parents apparently split the job of egg sitting equally, switching places every 48 hours, generally between midnight and 2am. Michelle showed a video clip of a hand off. When the relief parent arrived they did a little preening of one another and then the relieved parent flew off.
The second video clip she showed was footage of the male parent bringing a capelin to the chick. Shortly after the chick hatched the male brought the capelin seemingly without previously seen the egg hatch. At least Michelle and crew couldn't see any sign on the video that he had seen the chick hatch before bringing the fish. They are still looking through the video to see if they missed something, but the camera only picked up a small area, so a fly through wouldn't have been seen. Also captured on the tape, but not shown was the 2 minutes that the male dangled the fish in front of the chick, presumably to get its digestive juices going. What we saw was an edited clip, we saw the male arrive and the female move off of the chick. It was quite impressive to see the chick quickly gulp down the capelin which seemed way too long to fit in the bird.

Shortly after this time the male died, I believe eaten by an eagle (might have been a peregrine). The female successfully reared the chick on her own. The last video clip we saw was of the chick beating its wings (for about 1-2 minutes) prior to fledging. Much energy was expended exercising the wing muscles and removing the down. Once the chick fledged, neither bird returned to the nest.

The fourth nest was located, but hadn't been successful. We didn't hear much about this nest, so I can't remember exactly what occured. The photo that was shown of the area looked like a very young forest, which doesn't fit with what I've read about Kittlitz nesting habits.
So far what seems to be the largest pressure on the population is predation, although they may not be terribly successful at nesting either. With a one egg per year, reproduction seems awfully slow. Predation is probably increasing because of vegetation changes associated with deglaciation in the areas where Kittlitz's congregate. It seems that nesting of peregrines and eagles in Icy bay has increased over the years. They did find a number of eyries and plucking posts with alot of Kittlitz parts. One photo was of a radio transmitter in an eagle nest with the murrelet-eating eaglet standing by. Apparently, the local peregrines really like the taste of a Kittlitz's. There is a large colony of Glaucous-winged gulls, Arctic and Aleutian terns in the bay, but the "fat little footballs" are the preferred food. She also mentioned that Caspian terns were showing up in the breeding colonies.
Michelle didn't sound terribly hopeful about the future of this bird. Short of shooting peregrines and eagles in Icy Bay, its a little problematic on how to improve the birds chances. I don't expect that this is an acceptable solution.
http://www.nps.gov/glba/naturescience/upload/Kissling_etal2007_KittlitzMurrelettsOuterCoast.pdf
http://www.wildlifenews.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=wildlife_news.view_article&articles_id=226&issue_id=40

My bird observations have been rather limited this week. I'm hoping that I won't be quite as busy in the next few weeks. The golden eyes at the dock, a few glaucous winged gulls and the odd kingfisher (also at the dock) were the typical birds. My morning commute on Thursday included a marbled murrelet. Saturday morning commute happened around 11am and included more birds. I saw 3 loons (too far to identify), 2 fork-tailed petrels, 3 pelagic cormorants, golden-eyes, thayers gulls and the glaucous-winged that lives on the dock piling.
On Wednesday I did watch a greater white-fronted goose land in the parking lot near the ramp at UAS. It let one car pass it slowly by, but the second one must have been too much and it flew off. I am still seeing flocks of geese fly over.