July 23, 2023

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As I have done before, I combined today's walk with my monthly COASST survey for dead seabirds. My wife, Trish, walked the wet sand while I surveyed higher on the beach. We found and identified two intact, freshly dead Common Murres, one on the wet sand and a second carcass which Trish pulled from the water. As we finished recording our data, a man came up and said a similar bird with a broken leg was struggling in the surf to the north. As I approached that scene, I saw two boys were trying to reach the distressed bird, one boy in water up to his waist. By the time I got to the boys, they had given up, saying they had wanted to rescue the bird and call someone. I explained that the Oregon Coast Aquarium probably wouldn't be able to accept this bird for rehabilitation, Common Murres being the most common seabird that washes ashore, and that as hard as it was to watch, sometimes we had to let nature take its course.Although this was the first day I found more than one beached bird, that morning I had read an OPB article and listened to an interview with COASST's founder, Julia Parrish (link below), publicizing her and her associates' new research showing that, based on long term data collected by COASST volunteers, increasingly common mass mortality events of seabirds caused by warming ocean waters and consequent less abundant prey actually results in periods of post-event depressed carcass encounters, portending with continuing climate change an eventual reduction in carrying capacity for seabirds on the West Coast.https://www.opb.org/article/2023/07/23/seabirds-climate-change-die-off/