Mass die off of sea birds washing up along the Sonoma Coast in America

Scientists up and down the West Coast are monitoring what appears to be a large-scale die-off of young Cassin’s auklets, small seabirds whose breeding grounds include a colony in the Farallon Islands west of San Francisco.

Emaciated, white-bellied birds have been washing ashore in Sonoma County and along a broad swath of California coastline since early November after a period of ocean warming in the Farallones region and disappearance of the tiny krill that provide their main source of food, researchers say.

Scientists are still collecting data, but the largest concentration of dead birds appears to be in northern Oregon, according to monitors in the Pacific Northwest. Birds have been washing up in Washington, as well.

Scientists say anyone who finds a dead bird should leave it alone so that monitors surveying the beaches can collect accurate records on the die-off.

Just what’s behind the phenomenon is far from clear, those involved in the research say.

One factor may in fact be the species’ recent breeding success, which means a particularly large number of inexperienced fledglings were introduced last summer to the harsh challenges of life at sea, they said.

But there’s concern, at least locally, about the drastic shift in ocean temperature and feeding conditions — from those that facilitated several very productive breeding seasons to those that prompted nesting pairs in the Farallones to abandon their second round of eggs in July — and the potential for linkage to climate change.

Jaime Jahncke, director of California Current at Point Blue Conservation Sciences, which has monitored the Cassin’s auklets in the Farallon National Wildlife Refuge for more than four decades, said mean sea surface temperatures recorded in July and August were the second-highest in 45 years, and rose substantially in September.

But “you can have ocean warming for different reasons,” he said.

An anomalous warming in 2005 and 2006 — though it was winter — resulted in a large die-off of birds, as well as a season in which the birds did not come to the Farallones to breed, Jahncke said. There was also a high mortality event in 1997 and ’98.

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