Interesting...I'm curious how the timing of the NC wreck compared to the one in NY - was it also within a day or two, and was it close to Jun 18th?
In thinking about this, and in speaking with Joe when he was writing the NY Times article, I brought up the need for good baseline data. Based on the scattered reports of wrecks over the years, it seems that Great Shearwaters washing ashore in noticeable numbers is not that unusual on the East Coast - but there are several questions we can't answer without more data: 1) Is this a normal amount of mortality for the northward migration? 2) If so, are there reasons why sometimes the birds are closer to the coast, allowing us to detect the weak individuals as they hit the beaches? 3) If this is higher than normal mortality, do these periodic wrecks coincide with oceanographic patterns, either locally or remotely? 4) For comparison, what is the rate of beached Great Shearwaters when we don't see them coming ashore in a large pulse? The data in the Haman et al. paper I linked to in a previous thread give us a good starting point, but they only refer to 'wrecks', and only go up to 2011, so any patterns in the last few years are a mystery. We could start answering these questions if we had a system of regular beach monitoring up and down the Eastern Seaboard - a program like that exists in the West (the COASST <https://depts.washington.edu/coasst/> program), which I interacted with closely while I was doing my master's work at the University of Washington. A similar program used to exist here ( SEANET <https://vet.tufts.edu/seanet/>), but has since been put on hold due to lack of funding/interest. I contacted the director, Julie Ellis, who told me that John Stanton at USFWS (cc'ed) is hoping to continue SEANET. If there's anyone out there interested in helping with that effort, it would go a long way towards collecting some of these data. Cheers, Michael On Mon, Jul 24, 2017 at 3:33 PM, Paul R Sweet <sw...@amnh.org> wrote: > As a post-script to the Great Shearwater story, a colleague from the North > Carolina Museum informed me that the wreck extended to that state. One > rehabber there took in 80 birds. > > > > *From:* bounce-121663379-11471...@list.cornell.edu [mailto: > bounce-121663379-11471...@list.cornell.edu] *On Behalf Of *Tshrike19 > *Sent:* Monday, July 17, 2017 1:49 PM > *To:* NYSBirds-L@cornell.edu > *Subject:* [nysbirds-l] Fwd: A Mystery of Seabirds, Blown Off Course and > Starving - The New York Times > > > > Hi All, > > > > As Derek mentioned in a previous post, the coastal low pressure system > that set up from the night of the 6/17 through the 19th, resulted in a > strong and persistent onshore wind, as well as strong gusts. This system > resulted in strong southeast flow from new England all the way to key west > (I was there at the time), these conditions can certainly help concentrate > seabirds inshore where they are typically more scarce. In addition, as > also mentioned, there is an abundance of bait offshore. Many of the > charter and head boat captains I've chatted with (in NJ though) have > mentioned the abundance of sand eels offshore, with fluke being caught on > some of the Montauk boats spitting up sand eels on deck and some of the > charters going for tuna seeing bait balls of sand eels. It's probable > that large numbers of Shearwaters were already offshore due to food > availability with the weather system helping to concentrate them inshore. > If so much food is available offshore, why does it appear many are starving > is a question though, and we can only speculate as to what may be causing > this. Perhaps some of these birds arrived in the NY Bight in bad shape > already and didn't have the energy to actively forage (sick from a virus, > toxin load from algae??). Was anyone able to age the birds they were > finding dead, or will the folks who are receiving the dead shearwaters be > able to provide an age breakdown? Mortality tends to be high in first of > year birds, if there was a high percentage of young birds in this unusual > concentration off long Island it wouldn't be unusual finding a number of > dead birds (with an onshore wind to bring the dead and dying to shore). 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