https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/14/nyregion/seabird-deaths-long-island.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=Moth-Visible&moduleDetail=inside-nyt-region-2&module=inside-nyt-region®ion=inside-nyt-region&WT.nav=inside-nyt-region
<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/14/nyregion/seabird-deaths-long-island.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=Moth-Visible&moduleDetail=inside-nyt-region-2&module=inside-nyt-region®ion=inside-nyt-region&WT.nav=inside-nyt-region>
A Mystery of Seabirds, Blown Off Course and Starving
LIDO BEACH, N.Y. — Joe Okoniewski has seen this before, just not on this
scale. Each year Mr.
Okoniewski, a wildlife pathologist with the New York State Department of
Conservation, performs
necropsies on small numbers of seabird specimens that wash up dead along
the coastal parts of the state.
The birds are usually lone adults or juveniles that strayed too close to
shore.
This summer Mr. Okoniewski has already examined more than 20 dead birds,
while twice that many are
awaiting necropsies. All are the same species of agile seabird called
great shearwaters, and all washed up
emaciated on Long Island beaches last month in a mass mortality event
that scientists say is extraordinary
for the region.
Now Mr. Okoniewski and others are hoping the unusually large number of
carcasses can provide clues
into the mysterious lives of these birds, which are considered good
indicators of the health of the world’s
oceans.
“The birds are extremely thin and anemic,” Mr. Okoniewski said. “The big
mystery is: Why are they thin?
On the surface it looks like you know what happened: They starved. But
when you ask why, it becomes
much more of a mystery.”
Continue reading the main story
The vast expanses of the ocean remain some of the most vital and
hard-to-study environments on the
planet. As scientists work to comprehend the scope of climate change,
they often look to seabirds to tell
stories from the world’s most inaccessible waters. Pelagic birds, which
refers to seabirds that spend the
majority of their lives at sea and rarely venture to the shore, traverse
various regions and climates, are
affected by extreme weather patterns and feed on prey exposed to carbon
emissions — all while staying
relatively observable above the water’s surface.
Photo
One of the seabirds found in Atlantic City, N.J. Hundreds of carcasses
were found over the course of two weeks, from Montauk, N.Y., to as far south
as Cape May, N.J. Credit Scott McConnell
Greater shearwaters, which are long-winged birds the size of small sea
gulls, nest on some of the world’s
most remote islands in the south Atlantic, more than 1,500 miles from
land, before migrating to the
waters off New England and Newfoundland.
“These birds really illustrate the connectivity of ecosystems around the
world,” said Shai Mitra, a biologist
at the College of Staten Island.
Their sometimes-perilous journey takes them past Long Island each June,
but only after they have fueled
up at feeding grounds in the Caribbean. Living off fat reserves, they
glide up the Gulf Stream, rarely
venturing in sight of land.
“They are sort of an enigma for us to understand them because they are
so rarely seen,” said Paul Sweet,
an ornithologist at the American Museum of Natural History who is
preparing specimens of the birds and
freezing them so that they are available for study in the future.
Which is why it caused a stir within scientific circles in late June
when an offshore weather system pushed
an entire flock not just within sight of land, but also over the shores
of Nickerson Beach in Nassau County.
Birders flocked to Nickerson to get glimpses of hundreds of shearwaters
unsuccessfully fighting wind and
fog, like flapping flotsam.
“Many of the birds were over land. Many were flying right on the
shoreline,” said Isaac Grant, a birder
from Staten Island. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Eventually, I
stopped looking and started rescuing
birds.”
Hundreds of carcasses were found over the course of two weeks, from
Montauk west to Brooklyn and as
far south as Cape May, N.J.
Steve Walter, a photographer from Brooklyn, arrived at Nickerson Beach
to find straggling shearwaters
battling the surf. He picked one up to protect it from the waves,
“babysitting” it before rehabilitators
arrived.
“I never imagined myself holding a shearwater in my hands,” Mr. Walter said.
Nearly all of the dozens of birds recovered by rescuers eventually died,
and the bodies were sent to the
state Department of Conservation, the Museum of Natural History or
Cornell University’s Lab of
Ornithology.
Most of the victims were young birds, Mr. Okoniewski said. Though bits
of plastic were found in some of
their stomachs, starvation, not plastic ingestion, remains the
overarching cause of death, he concluded.
In years past, shearwaters have been found beached in large numbers in
other parts of the United States.
The winds that forced the birds over land in and around New York City
last month were relatively benign,
further deepening the mystery.
Why couldn’t the birds fight them? What threw them off course in the
first place? How long had it been
since they had eaten?
“For a phenomenon of this magnitude, you have to make quite a large
front,” Mr. Sweet said. “Why they
were in that area of sea that had no food? I don’t know if we will ever
know that.”
The beachings could say more about the health of the birds’ feeding
grounds in the Caribbean than about
the quality of the waters closer to New York, said Michael Schrimpf, a
doctoral candidate at Stony Brook
University who is specializing in seabird ecology.
“When we have these large numbers washing ashore at one time, how much
different from normal is
that?” Mr. Schrimpf asked. “That’s hard to know if we don’t have a
baseline of what normal is.”
--
NYSbirds-L List Info:
http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsWELCOME.htm
http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsRULES.htm
http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm
ARCHIVES:
1) http://www.mail-archive.com/nysbirds-l@cornell.edu/maillist.html
2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/NYSBirds-L
3) http://birding.aba.org/maillist/NY01
Please submit your observations to eBird:
http://ebird.org/content/ebird/
--
