Witnessing Extinction by Casey Tucker, American Avian Conservation & Research Institute and Otterbein University

Gannet. Photo by Casey Tucker.

Warming oceans affect food availability for birds and as a result, seabirds are dying off rapidly around the globe. This year Little Penguins have been washing up along the shores of New Zealand by the thousands. Autopsies have revealed that the birds starved to death because they couldn’t get the prey they depend on in the warmer ocean waters.

Witnessing Extinction
By Casey Tucker, American Avian Conservation & Research Institute and Adjunct Instructor, Otterbein University

In August of 2016 I had the good fortune to visit Machias Seal Island off the coast of northern Maine to watch Atlantic Puffins.  What I encountered was sad and scary. Adult puffins were few and far between. Those that were present were working hard to feed their chicks, and the calls of abandoned, starving chicks could be heard coming from their burrows. That summer 90% of the chicks died due to starvation because parents couldn’t find enough food in the warming waters. Sadness is looking into the eyes of a starving puffling and realizing that you’re witnessing extinction.
We’ve all heard the tales of how millions or billions of Passenger Pigeons went extinct in the early 20th century as Martha sat alone in a cage in the Cincinnati Zoo, but what we rarely hear about is what did the beginning of the end look like?  What was it like when they first started declining? Did people start noticing the silence in forests that were once seasonally cacophonous with pigeon cooing and flapping wings? We are going to be witnessing this kind of mass extinction sooner than we realize, particularly among our seabirds.

It began innocuously enough in 2012 when colonies of several seabird species in the western North Atlantic, along the coast of North America, began experiencing a failure to fledge their chicks.  Puffin chicks, part of the Project Puffin islands off the mid-coast of Maine, starved to death even though their parents were bringing them lots of fish to eat. The problem was that the Jet Stream carried warmer waters north into the Gulf of Maine creating warmer waters where the puffins foraged. The ocean temperatures were the highest they had been in 150 years. The fish that the parents usually fed their chicks were normally cold-loving fish who couldn’t cope with the warmer waters, and a warm-water fish, called the butterfish, flourished in the warm waters and grew faster.  The parents were bringing back these larger butterfish to the pufflings who couldn’t swallow them because of their size. Many people watched on the internet puffin cam as a chick, nicknamed “Petey,” starved to death in spite of a burrow full of butterfish too large to eat.
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Puffins, however, were not the only species to experience problems in the summer of 2012.  That same year, much further north, on Bonaventure Island off the coast of the Gaspé Peninsula of Quebec, the largest colony of Northern Gannets in North America also experienced some major problems.  Only 8% of the chicks survived to fledge that year; a record low in a colony that was already experiencing a long-term decline in reproductive success. To put that into perspective, it’s estimated that 53,000 gannets nest on Bonaventure Island. Only around 4,000 chicks survived to fledge that summer.  A study found that the reason for this was warming waters flowing from the Gulf of St. Lawrence which caused the parents to have more difficulty finding the right kind of food to bring to their chicks and those chicks starved to death in spite of their parents’ best efforts.

The summer of 2013 wasn’t much better for the puffins on the Project Puffin islands in Maine.  Warm waters once again affected the puffin chicks’ survival to fledging. Not only was there a low fledging rate, in some cases as low as 10% for one island, but the number of burrows occupied was lower as well (meaning fewer individuals trying to produce chicks).

Puffin. Photo by Casey Tucker.

Gannet. Photo by Casey Tucker.

Puffins off of the Maine coast recovered in 2014, but the story was much different for Northern Gannets nesting further north in Newfoundland.  That summer gannets were abandoning their nests in record numbers and chicks were starving to death in a mass die-off. Warmer waters in the North Atlantic meant that the birds once again found difficulty in finding food to feed their young and themselves, so they had to make the ultimate sacrifice to save themselves, so they could breed again in the future, and abandon their chicks that summer.

​Sadly, 2015 brought the same mass die-off of gannets in the North Atlantic due to lack of food, and in the summer of 2017 gannets were further stressed by a toxic algal bloom which resulted in dead gannets washing up on shores between southern Maine and Massachusetts. This algal bloom was the result of warm waters as well.

I wish I could say that these events were isolated incidents, but globally seabirds are dying off rapidly. This year Little Penguins have been washing up along the shores of New Zealand by the thousands.  Autopsies have revealed that the birds starved to death because they couldn’t get the prey they depend on in the warmer ocean waters.
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In 2017 a colony of 40,000 Adelie penguins experienced a mass chick die-off.  Only two chicks survived as thousands more starved to death, an event that also happened in 2013 when no chicks survived.  The reason is that warming conditions actually caused the break off of a large glacier which affected the formation of sea ice near the penguin colony, and caused rainy conditions. The parents had to travel farther to find food, leaving the chicks, which lack waterproof feathers, exposed to the rain and without food for longer periods of time.

At National Audubon Society: Its Time to Give a Flock. Climate Initiative-Audubon taps into people’s love of birds to protect them from climate change. Photo by Camilla Cerea/Audubon. Read More 

​In 2014 9,000 dead Cassin’s Auklets washed up on the shores between British Columbia and California due to a mass of warm water that prevented deep sea up-wellings that bring nutrients to the ocean surface.  As a result the Auklets starved to death because of a lack of nutrients. Those that survived had switched to a less nutritious food source, and were hunting in a smaller area than they normally would.

BirdLife international has reported the mass die-off of Black-legged Kittiwakes off the coast of Scotland, Greenland and Norway, some as steep as 96% decline again due to warming ocean waters.  As I write this in the summer of 2018 thousands of Black-legged Kittiwakes, Atlantic Puffins, Northern Fulmars, Arctic Terns and other seabirds of the North Atlantic are silent, having almost completely abandoned Sumburgh Head along the southern coast of mainland Shetland. Again, this is due to warming oceans affecting food availability for these birds.

Meet Casey Tucker, American Avian Conservation & Research Institute and Adjunct Instructor, Otterbein University in the 2016 WCAS speaker video, "DIY-Conservation Biology".

We have it in our ability to help alter this situation so that within the next decade more seabirds don’t go the way of the Great Auk. We can no longer sit back and block green energy solutions. We need real solutions now because as seabirds go so too will other species, like warblers, and these numbers are much greater than the handful of birds, by comparison, that may be impacted by wind turbines or other forms of green energy.  Additionally, new technologies, like early detection systems, are being developed to make green energy technology more bird safe. We can, through technology and science, make green energy safer for birds, but we can’t wait until these things are perfect and result in no bird deaths. We must take action now because we can’t change ocean temperatures through technology.
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Try looking into the eyes of a starving puffling and see if you don’t feel the same need to take action now and support green energy development, so that we don’t have to explain to future generations how we let Atlantic Puffins go extinct in our lifetime.

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Casey Tucker. Photo by Betsey Merkel.

Casey Tucker possesses a Master’s degree in Biology with an emphasis on Inquiry based education from Miami University. Casey is an Adjunct Instructor with Central Ohio Technical College where he teaches courses in Environmental Science as well as Anatomy and Physiology. He was recognized as a 2016 STEM Exemplar by the Ohio Academy of Science. He lives in Utica, Ohio with his Wife, two dogs, two cats and a bunch of tropical fish and dabbles in photography when he finds the time (i.e. when he’s not grading student assignments).

​Casey created the American Avian Conservation and Research Institute which he uses as a platform to pursue informal research projects, and to organize and host the annual Ohio Avian Research Conference, in October, which brings together professional ornithologists from museums and other academic institutions, high school, undergraduate, and graduate students, government agencies, as well as non-professional researchers and citizen scientists alike from all over Ohio to present and share their research projects with one another and with other interested individuals through oral and poster
presentations. The overall goal of this conference is to promote the importance of the science of Ornithology. (details, right) 

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​Event: 6th Annual Ohio Avian Research Conference
Day & Time: Saturday, October 20th, 2018, 9:00 am - 6:00 pm
Location: Samson-Talbot Hall of Biological Science, Denison University, Ridge Rd, Granville, OH 43023
Director: Casey Tucker, Ph: 614-403-5263 Email: [email protected]
Follow: Website
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Description: Keynote speaker Dr. Robert Mauck of Kenyon College, researches seabirds with a focus on Leach's Storm-Petrels and co-wrote the species account for Leach's Storm-petrels for the Birds of North America series.  Additionally he served as Director, Bowdoin Scientific Station at Kent Island near Brunswick, Maine and prior to joining academia he was a smoke jumper in Alaska and an assistant coach to an American Football team in Italy.  

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