Citizen science a push of this year's bird festival

At last week's 21st annual Stikine River Birding Festival, increasing public involvement in conservation efforts was a strong theme.

The festival's focus always centers around the diverse bird species found around Wrangell and the Stikine River, highlighting different ways for residents and visitors alike to understand and enjoy them. From birdwatching to outdoor photography, using them thematic in the arts or enticing birds to backyards with self-built houses and feeders, the birding festival encourages a wide array of activities.

One of the themes this year was citizen science, a means of enlisting interested amateurs to collect data primarily useful to researchers. Among the four-day event's keynote speakers was Julia Parrish, a professor at the University of Washington since 1990.

"I've worked in Alaska that whole time as well," she told her audience at the Nolan Center last Friday.

Parrish's big project is the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST), which for the past 17 years has trained residents along the Pacific coast to collect information on seabirds that allow her team of researchers to more accurately gauge the populations of different species. It first started as a way to provide a baseline against which the effects of an oil spill could be assessed, but has since branched out to assist in a variety of issues, from climate change to harmful algal blooms.

"It's a bird program, but with a twist," Parrish said. "In this program we teach people to go collect data on dead seabirds."

So why deceased birds? She explained dead birds pose several benefits to researchers, for one being their ease of being observed. ("They're dead!" Parrish said.)

To understand how that helps, Parrish first laid out four key points to take away about seabirds.

One is that they live a long time, relative to other avians. For instance, the common murre – a common sight along the Alaskan Pacific Coast – tends to live from 20 to 25 years. Gulls can live anywhere from 15 to 40 years, while the albatross leads about as long a life as a human, between 50 and 70 years.

"People are just now getting to the life length of an albatross," Parrish noted.

Seabirds also expend a great amount of time and effort into reproduction, tending only to raise one chick per year. Raising the next generation takes the effort of both parents, who split duties minding and feeding their young. Parents tend to lose quite a bit of weight during the process.

Parrish also pointed out that seabirds tend to have wide ranges through the year, flying long distances between seasons. Citing a figure that the average American travels 250 miles each year for vacation, she contrasted this with the northern fulmar, which can travel about 15,000 miles in a given year. At under two pounds, the sooty shearwater surpasses all others by making its rounds over 40,000 miles.

"Every single sooty shearwater in the world is like an Alaska Airlines Platinum member," Parrish joked.

The last titbit about seabirds she had to share was about their shapes, which can be informative about their activities and range. For example, open ocean-going birds are distinguishable by their long, thin wings, while coastal shelf dwellers like the puffin are "football-shaped." Those subsisting closer to shore are shaped somewhere in between, and have legs and feet suitable to walking.

Taken together, these points illustrate that the corpses of these generally migratory seabird species are often found at particular places at particular times of year. When and where they show up and in what frequency can often yield information about how the population as a whole is faring, which can be quite useful for species that spend most of their time at sea.

What death teaches can at times seem counterintuitive. With murres, for example, Parrish explained that during the breeding season the presence of more dead adults along the beaches than usual indicates a rough year for breeding. A larger number of dead chicks, conversely, is a good sign, and corresponds with high reproductive years.

After 17 years of collecting data on various species, the COASST researchers are able to develop an average frequency for how many birds tend to die, and when. Postmortem examinations can indicate whether the cause is natural or bacterial in nature, or else hastened by parasites or plastics. In the instance of abnormally large die-off events, other environmental factors can be at play.

In the winter of 2015/16, for example, Alaska had an alarming die-off of common murres, up to 1,000 times greater than normal and for a nine-month stretch. What seemed to be at the root of the problem was emaciation.

"These birds couldn't get enough to eat," Parrish recalled.

Flustered and hungry, they would work their way to shore before dying in great numbers. Of an estimated population of 3,000,000 in Alaska, around 700,000 of the birds died that year. At the same time, the Gulf of Alaska had been experiencing its unusually warm "blob" of water temperatures, which lingered on for several seasons.

"This warm water brought a different ecosystem with it," Parrish said, which in turn affected the food sources murres and other species rely upon. The marine heatwave did not just impact avians, but is thought to have been behind the recent decline in king salmon stock as well.

Troublingly, die-off events such as that seen among murres have been happening with increasing frequency as marine temperatures incrementally rise.

"This gives us a window into the future," she said.

One of the benefits of citizen science programs like COASST is about connecting people to such developments, bringing them closer to home in a sense. The program also encourages participants to consider things in a more scientific light, seeing patterns and drawing hypotheses from there. From its site, COASST recognizes citizens of coastal communities as essential scientific partners in monitoring marine ecosystem health. By collaborating together with natural resource management agencies and environmental organizations, the program works to translate long-term monitoring into effective marine conservation solutions.

To find out more about the program, check out its webpage at http://depts.washington.edu/coasst/.