Lone murre found near Shishmaref
Last Wednesday, a resident of Shishmaref made an unlikely find: A thick-billed murre, lying weak and near death in the snow in the village. The bird is currently alive and being nursed to health at the Bird Treatment and Learning Center in Anchorage, but how it got that far north in the middle of winter remains a mystery.
When the murre was first found, it was very thin, and too weak to fly. It spent a night indoors in Shishmaref before getting on a Bering Air flight to Nome, where it was picked up by Gay Sheffield, Nome’s marine advisory agent with Alaska Sea Grant. She said the bird was young, and probably left the nest about a year ago. It was also emaciated, like many of the dead seabirds that have been washing up on regional beaches in recent years. “You could feel the chest bone,” Sheffield said. “The bird needed food.” She tried to send it on the soonest cargo flight to Anchorage, where it could be studied by scientists from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the entity that manages seabirds in Alaska.
But that day, the freighter to Anchorage was cancelled because of issues at the airport. So, the bird spent the night at Sheffield’s house, and she sent it off the following day. Sheffield said she wasn’t sure if it would survive the trip, but when USFWS Seabird Biologist Robb Kaler picked it up at Alaska Air Cargo in Anchorage, he said it was actually doing it alright.
“Sometimes with these birds, their eyes will be closing, or their heads will be turning back,” he said. “But this one looked like it was hanging in there.” Had it passed away, its body would have been studied by scientists in Anchorage and probably sent to the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin for a full necropsy. But after seeing the bird still holding on to life, Kaler “screamed across town in my Subaru” to deliver it to the Bird Treatment and Learning Center, which specializes in wildlife rehabilitation. “It’s emaciated as well as dehydrated, so I’m sure the first thing they’re going to do is give it some liquids,” Kaler said. He wasn’t sure if it had an injury that would prevent it from being released back into the wild.
“It was found pretty far inland, so finding an area to re-release it might be a bit of a challenge,” he said. “But it would be a happy ending if we could get this bird released back out.”
Finding a seabird near Shishmaref in the middle of February is not a common occurrence and raises questions about the effects of climate change that are becoming more and more evident in the region. Sheffield explained that the winter range of the thick-billed murre is generally south of St. Lawrence Island, where there’s open ocean for the birds to get to the fish they eat.
To complicate matters, there had been a strong north wind when the bird was found, making it unlikely that it had blown in from the south during a storm.
Kaler said he had looked at satellite images of the southern Chukchi Sea from around the time period and seen no areas of open water where the bird may have been feeding. All the ice was shore-fast. He suspected it had been blown by the wind to some extent. He recalled a large “wreck” of murres in 2015 and 2016, in which huge storms from the Gulf of Alaska blew the seabirds as far inland as Talkeetna and even Fairbanks.
But that still doesn’t explain why the bird was in the Chukchi Sea in the first place, in the middle of winter when all of its fishing grounds had long been iced over. Neither Sheffield nor Kaler were sure why that would be, but it may forebode another year of strange environmental anomalies in the Bering Strait region.