Secretive murrelet turns up in unexpected place

POPPY BENSON

October 02, 2008 at 9:36AM AKST

Like a scene from a mystery novel, dense fog rolled over rugged, uninhabited and storm-swept Agattu Island. Whirling wings startled Robb Kaler, a graduate student at Kansas State University, as a small brown bird vanished into the fog, offering only a tantalizing glimpse of the secretive Kittlitz’s murrelet.

“I was so startled at the time that I wasn’t exactly sure what I’d found,” said Kaler. Looking down, he discovered at his feet a nest holding a lone egg, turquoise with brown streaks.

It was 2005 and the nest Kaler found hidden on the scree slope was one of only 23 known in the world at that time and only the second nest found in the 1000-mile long Aleutian archipelago.

When Kaler left his tent that morning to track rock ptarmigan for a restoration program on Alaska Maritime Refuge, he didn’t expect to stumble upon the nest of one of the least known seabirds in North America.

The center of abundance for this rare species was thought to be far to the east and the prevailing wisdom was that Kittlitz’s murrelets nested close to glaciers.

Glaciers have been gone from Agattu for centuries, but nevertheless, there was a nest. Determined to learn more about this elusive bird, Kaler returned to Agattu two more summers with partner Leah Kenney,  finding 11 nests in  2006 and 17 in 2008.

“Every time we find one it’s such a spectacular feeling, because so few have been found,” said Kaler.

Scattered, isolated and camouflaged nest sites containing a single cryptic egg, nondescript feather coloring and the birds’ sneaky habit of returning to the nest only in the gloom of evening and early morning kept researchers from finding nests and unraveling secrets of murrelet reproduction.

The Agattu nests are the most that have been found in any one area and represent half of all known nests. Kaler and Kenney, in a soon-to-be published work, were first to confirm the diminutive murrelet nested in the western Aleutians and to reveal other murrelet mysteries.

In their study this summer, Kaler and Kenney documented nest survival and chick growth and discovered grim news about chick survival. While egg predators and non-hatching eggs led to some nest failure, more commonly chicks were discovered dead in the nest.

Hidden cameras trained on the nests revealed that, despite attention from parents, chicks died either from weather in a part of the world known as the “Birthplace of the Winds” or starvation. Only about half the eggs hatched and only 1 out of 9 chicks lived to fledge in the 17 nests studied this summer.

Even after leaving the nest, life remains hard for fledgling chicks. Fledglings, half the size of the adults, must fend for themselves in the open ocean. The low reproductive rate observed by Kaler and Kenney may be the lowest of any seabird species.

This new information about Kittlitz’s murrelets is critical because there are only about 10,000 world-wide, their range limited to Alaska and adjacent Siberia. And their numbers are declining. Monitoring in their core range in southeast Alaska showed population declines of 80 percent over the past 20 years.

Possible reasons for this decline remain speculative, but include oil spill and gill net mortality, changes in diet influenced by climate change and loss of nesting habitat due to glacial recession. The Kittlitz’s murrelet is proposed for listing as a Threatened and Endangered Species.

Kaler and Kenney hope to be able to continue their work in a five-year study to gain further insight into the life history of this elusive bird. Their snapshot of nest survival at Agattu sheds light on this mysterious bird’s fragile existence and raises new questions about why chick survival is so grim.   

Poppy Benson is the public programs supervisor for the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge.­­­­­­­­­­­­­