Marbled Murrelet

Transcript

Dirty Freehub 0:06

This is the connection. A duty free hub podcast connecting gravel cyclists to where they ride through short stories about culture, history, people, places, inland.

I’m Kira Corbett in Today on the Journey from Hope Connection, we have Dr. Jim Rivers, Associate Professor of Wildlife Ecology.

Dr. Jim Rivers – Oregon State University focuses his research around understanding wildlife and forced ecosystems, one of which including the marbled Malay. Dr. Jim Rivers – Oregon State University, thank you so much for joining us today. So glad to have you.

Dr. Jim Rivers – Oregon State University 0:39

Thanks for having me.

Dirty Freehub 0:40

Yeah. Could you tell us about this very unique bird? I’ve seen that this bird, the marbled merlot. And it looks like it’s like flying underwater. Do they actually fly underwater?

Dr. Jim Rivers – Oregon State University 0:50

Yes. So the marble Merlot is a small bird. It’s about the size of a robin and it’s a seabird. So it gets all of its food from the ocean. But it has this unique behavior in that it flies long distances inland to nest, and its nests are found in succession on old growth forests in our coastal areas. Here in Oregon. They’re also found in California and Washington and all the way up into the Aleutian Islands as well. And when they’re foraging, as you said, they actually look like they’re flying under water. There are some birds that use their feet to propel them underwater and they’ll put their wings against their body to have reduced drag. Something like a cormorant would do that. Orcas are different and oxer the family in which boats are found. So puffins and murres and mullets all use their wings to to have locomotion underwater when they’re when they’re pursuing prey items.

Dirty Freehub 1:42

Yeah, that’s fascinating. I was watching some videos and it totally looks like they just propel themselves and, like, steer themselves with just their wings, which is pretty cool.

Dr. Jim Rivers – Oregon State University 1:50

Yeah. And if if you want to see mullets marbled mullets, for some reason they don’t do well in captivity. And people have tried to have them in aviaries and have had real problems with them. There are other species in that rock that I mentioned, like murres and puffins. Those species can be found at the Oregon Coast Aquarium and there’s an outdoor aviary where you can see these birds flying under water. So if any of your listeners are in the Newport area, that’s a great place to see these birds and how they actually fly under water, as you described.

Dirty Freehub 2:22

You mentioned they were found a little bit about the ore found around the Oregon coast. Are they found in other places?

Dr. Jim Rivers – Oregon State University 2:29

Yeah. So mullets are a species that are a near-shore species, which means although they use the ocean, it’s a very restricted amount of the ocean. And so if you’re looking for this bird in the coastal waters, you’re usually going to find it within just a couple of kilometers off shore. So. So even less than a mile under most conditions. And you can find mullets. It’s anywhere from northern California, again, all the way up to the Aleutian Islands in the in the lower 48 states and in British Columbia, they’re classified as threatened or endangered, depending on whether you’re thinking about province level, state level or federal level. Here in the States, they’re under the Endangered Species Act as threatened. So there’s a lot of conservation concern about this species, in part because it nests in older forests. So we have a lot fewer older forests than what we used to have over time. But more recently, we were also seeing a lot of changes to our ocean conditions, particularly in that nearshore zone where markets are are getting all the food that they collect for themselves and for their chicks during the breeding season.

Dirty Freehub 3:31

Wow. What do they look like and what makes them unique as a bird?

Dr. Jim Rivers – Oregon State University 3:36

Well, the real thing that separates Merlot from most other members of the Ark family go back to orcs is as because it’s useful for comparison. If you know anything about tufted puffins, for example, or some of the other puffin species that we have during the breeding season, the birds have these very elaborate plumes on their head. For tufted puffins, their bill gets a bright orange and yellow and blue color of Merlot to go the other direction. That because they’re going inland and they are dispersing across the landscape. What they’re trying to do is find a nest site that is safe and that they can sneak in and have a very reduced amount of activity around the nest site. So unlike their cousins in the family, Merlot are very drab during the breeding season, mostly brown with some chestnuts and some speckling here and there. But what really makes them unique is, is that they’re moving into these forests and they’re nesting in for us. If we think about tufted puffins, we think about murres and you’re folks who are listening to this or watching this are familiar with the Iaquinta head lighthouse area. We have tens of thousands of murres that are all crammed on to a big giant rock right on the edge of the ocean. And that’s where the bird’s nest and that’s where they leave from for their foraging. You can’t go out and find a big congregation of more or less like that. They’re dispersed. And some of these nests believe it or not, can be up to 80 kilometers or more inland. So we’re talking 40, 50 miles that this bird is coming in, going to the nest and then going back to the ocean and the only thing that it does in those those forested areas is nest or search for nests. So it’s not getting any sort of food or anything. It just goes in the breeding season. The male and female share incubation duties, and they do so for 24 hours at a time. So a male will go in in the morning and he’ll relieve the female and she’ll go back to the coast and then that male will sit on the nest for four, 24 hours. And then the next morning, very early, probably around five or six in the morning, the female will come to the nest and then the male will go back and they do that for the course of almost a month and then they have another month to a month and a half of feeding that the chick that hatches. They only have a single egg. And when they come in, she’s really crazy. But when they come in, they only take a single fish with them. They don’t take a whole mouthful. They don’t regurgitate food like some birds do it. Carry that one fish all the way in. Maybe 40, 50 kilometers. Feed it to the chick, and then they fly back to the ocean to get another one.

Dirty Freehub 6:01

That is dedication.

Dr. Jim Rivers – Oregon State University 6:04

It’s true. It really is.

Dirty Freehub 6:06

Now they’re like, really dispersed. So is there is there really any ways to, like, look for them aside from maybe visiting them in up in captivity? But is there ways like or pinch to like finding them on the Oregon coast?

Dr. Jim Rivers – Oregon State University 6:18

Yeah. So there are some some hot spots for merlot in the one that I think of is the Cape Perpetua campground, which is a spot that is south of Newport. And if you go into that campground during the breeding season, particularly into June and July and you get out there just before dawn, you can hear the birds as they’re coming in because they often fly over the campground and head further inland. And there’s one spot at the all the way into the group campground where there’s a little bit of a an area that you can look up and you can see them coming in. But again, it’s low light conditions. These are birds that can fly upwards of 60 to 70 miles per hour as they’re cruising in. So they’re they’re they’re in a flash and they’re gone. So you really have to to keep your eye out if you’re in that sort of location. However, I mentioned earlier that they’re in the near-shore environment for their foraging. So if you get to a spot that’s really good, like off the the outlets of particular rivers, you can see them congregating in the near-shore areas. Now, you have to be able to identify them with binoculars and tell them from the other birds that are out there. And sometimes there’s a number of different species of of ox and ducks, but they are visible from from land.

Dirty Freehub 7:27

Well, they’re an interesting little bird. I want to circle back to you. You were mentioning that they were endangered. Why exactly are they endangered?

Dr. Jim Rivers – Oregon State University 7:35

Well, they have a couple of different stressors on their populations. And that’s that’s true over time. One of the biggest is the loss of older forests. And in the coastal force that we have here in Oregon. So we know that these birds require late succession or old growth forest because when they’re nesting, they don’t actually build a nest. What they do is they look for a large horizontal limb which serves as a platform of sorts, and the birds will come in and the female will lay an egg into kind of a mossy a bed of moss on one of those really large limbs. But if you think about it, that chick is going to be on that nest once the egg hatches with the parents. They need a fair bit of space. And it also needs to be fairly level because if not, the egg isn’t going to be able to stay on the limb. And what that means is that you have to have really large trees for these birds to have a platform that they can use. Now in other parts of their range, they may nest on the ground. If you get up into Alaska and parts of Canada, but in Oregon, we only know them as a tree nesting species. So because we’ve lost a lot of that old growth forests with a lot of those really large trees, that means that we’ve lost habitat for the birds. So numbers that we have in the Oregon coast right now are lower relative to historic levels, and that’s the terrestrial side. But as I mentioned, this is a bird of two worlds. They nest in the forest, but they’re getting food from the ocean during the breeding season. So some of the changes that we’ve seen to ocean conditions, you may remember not that long ago we had a marine heat wave in the North Pacific nicknamed The Blob, that led to a lot of issues for seabirds, not just Merlins, but seabirds more broadly, because it really changed the nature of the food chain that Mertz depend upon. So this species is of conservation concern both for the loss of nesting habitat, it’s reduced populations, but also some of the future threats it faces, both from habitat loss and through climate change, particularly in the ocean.

Dirty Freehub 9:27

Is there a good way for people interested in this bird or even as a gravel cyclist to help support the wildlife or birds like them?

Dr. Jim Rivers – Oregon State University 9:34

You know, one of the biggest things that I think people can do is be cognizant of when they’re in areas that more or less may be and in particular, campgrounds are one, like I mentioned, the Cape Perpetua campground in Oregon. That’s one where a lot of people go. They enjoy camping out, they have a barbecue, but they may not be familiar with some of the predators of Merlot, like Steller’s Jays and common ravens. And the reason there’s a connection there is because a lot of the time when we’re camping out, we spill food on the ground or maybe we leave something out or in some cases some people might want to see those birds. And so, oh, I’m going to throw some food out to the Steller’s Jays and get a really good look. Or maybe get a photo of them. What that does, though, is it inflates the population of those nest predators families and ultimately it leads to more predators in the area. And there’s not enough merlot nests for these birds to be going out and looking for a merlot nest, per se. But if there’s enough of those birds moving around by chance, they’re going to run into to nest more often. So there’s a campaign that started in California. We have a program here in Oregon. I think Washington does as well. It’s called a crumb clean campaign. And the idea is if you’re recreating in these areas, make sure that you don’t leave any food behind. Obviously, you don’t want to leave any trash. you know, I’ve got a little bit of food left. I’ll just I won’t pack it out. But we really want people to be thinking about that effect it has on those crows and those ravens and those jays. simple thing to do and where we’ve seen it implemented well, we also see a reduction in those nest predators. And so we think those areas are actually better for Merlyn nesting than they used to be because the predator populations have reduced and in theory the potential for NEST to fail due to predation has also been reduced.

Dirty Freehub 11:14

I know some of your team has been looking into this as well, but what sort of new research has your team undertaken to better understand it?

Dr. Jim Rivers – Oregon State University 11:22

Yeah. So our team initiated a project called the Oregon Model Merlot Project back in 2016. And this was established as a long term, large scale study to better understand what sort of nesting habitat requirements Maryland need in Oregon’s coastal forests, specifically in the central part around Newport. And so what our project was focused around, and it’s coming to an end now, so we’re not doing any more fieldwork. But when we were doing fieldwork, we were going out on the ocean at night during the early breeding season, capturing birds and putting on tracking devices so we could follow birds from the ocean into the forests. And what that allowed us to do was to get a handle on where these nests were without any sort of bias in terms of our starting point. Because you can imagine if a bird’s nesting 60 kilometers inland, you can’t just search everywhere. You have to choose location. So instead of choosing locations and maybe biasing where where our study was undertaken, we went up to the ocean and let the birds decide that. So over five years we’ve tagged 300 Merlins. We’ve been able to find 37 nests through the course of that, which doesn’t sound like a lot. And it’s actually not a lot in comparison to other studies. Only about 13% of our birds were breeding. And we think part of that is because we’ve had some ocean conditions that weren’t really conducive to nesting in the last few years. Some of which were coming behind that marine heat wave in the North Pacific. So we’ve been teasing apart kind of how mullets are doing in terms of their nest success, where they’re nesting. And then we’ve also been thinking about provisioning behavior. mentioned those birds come in with a single fish. And so we want to know, well, what sort of species are they bringing into their chick? How often are they doing it? Is that changing with ocean conditions? So we’re really trying to integrate what’s going on in the forest and what the birds need to produce a chick successfully and then think about the ocean conditions at the same time.

Dirty Freehub 13:10

Thank you so much. Dr.. there anything else you’d like to add?

Dr. Jim Rivers – Oregon State University 13:13

You know, Berlitz are a species that not everyone gets to see. So I think if any of your listeners get to see one or hear one for that matter, it’s kind of a special thing because we don’t have them all over the place. They are restricted in terms of their breeding habitat and where they’re going to be spending their time. So I think if folks are lucky enough to go to a campground and hear them, or maybe they’ll see them on the water, it’s worth taking a moment because it’s a species that’s not very common. It’s it’s of high conservation status. And so take it moment to kind of enjoy that, I think is what I would suggest.

Dirty Freehub 13:44

Thank you so much. You know, I didn’t even realize, but I don’t think I heard their sound. What do they sound like?

Dr. Jim Rivers – Oregon State University 13:50

When they come in, they have care call that give. And oftentimes they they get that as they circle around a given stand of force that might be suitable for nesting. So it is distinct. And the thing that stands out about it, if you compare it with other birds in the forest, it stands out because it actually sounds like a seabird. If someone hears a seabird in the forest and you’re in the range of more or less, you may very well be hearing one call.

Dirty Freehub 14:15

I will have to go look out for that. Thank you so much.

Dr. Jim Rivers – Oregon State University 14:18

You’re welcome.

Dirty Freehub

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