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Wednesday, August 19, 2009

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THIS WEEK'S HEADLINES

• Homer preps for swine flu

• Pebble’s progress necessarily slow

• A dozen candidates file for city, borough offices

• Mayor Carey warns of ‘brown-outs’

• FYI

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

• In a cave . . . in the rain

• Jewel Kilcher returns home

• test

SPORTS

• Voz Cougars dominate eight-man football field

• Homer turns out in pink to run for the cure

• Homer Halibut derby standings

FEATURE

• When pigs fly

• Ninilchik pair finds net mending a dying art

BUSINESS

YOUTH

• Youth get creative about climate change

Kittlytz’s Murrelet might foretell of climate change

• Rare bird photographed, studied by Homer biologist

By Naomi Klouda
Homer Tribune

October 29, 2008

Photos provided

Biologist Robb Kaler was able to capture these photos of the chick Kittlytz on Agatttu Island.

PART II
This is the second in a three-part series on the
changing climate and Homer agencies’ involvement

The Kittlytz’s Murrelet, a rare bird shyly spending its life among Alaska’s most untouched regions, was observed and photographed by a Homer U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist this summer.
The photos and observations may provide some firsts to the body of data known about the murrelet, first observed in the early 1800s and named after German naturalist Heinrich von Kittlytz.
Robb Kaler, and his partner Leah Kenney, initiated a four-year study on Agattu Island this summer, hoping to collect more information on the rare bird. Not much is known about this murrelet species, whose range is Prince William Sound, Icy and Glacier Bays and a few islands on the Aleutians.
Yet, at a time when biologists are poised to find out more, the Kittlytz’s Murrelet is considered a candidate for endangered species status. Climate changes such as receding glaciers and food availability are likely suspects, researchers say.
Long-term monitoring in the Gulf Murrelet is considered a candidate for endangered species status. Climate changes such as receding glaciers and food availability are likely suspects, researchers say.
Long-term monitoring in the Gulf of Alaska region reveal declining trends with up to 80 percent of local populations disappearing in the past 10-20 years, Kaler said.
“We’ve had long-term population monitoring in Prince William Sound, Glacier Bay and Icy Bay. That’s where we see the population decline,” Kaler said. “The causes are speculative; we don’t know if it’s oil spills or gill net mortality. Likely, the receding glaciers has a great deal to do with that as well as ocean temperature changes.”
Whatever the causes, the birds are having a hard time feeding themselves as well as their young. At Agattu Island, the challenges to survival may be coming from a climate that has changed its available food source.

The discovery
In 2005, Kaler was working on his master’s degree project studying another bird at Agattu Island, the rock ptarmigan. Since the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge covers a vast region of 47,300 miles of coastline, U.S. Fish and Wildlife hire numerous summer biologists to help with bird and other surveys. They are dropped off along the Aleutian Chain by the M/V Tiglax.
Kaler was assigned to Agattu in the Near Islands group the past three summers. This is an island near Attu that formerly held fox populations from the days of fox farming, but was targeted for a predation extinction program in the 1970s that proved successful. Now birds are able to return to the island, that perhaps had been made extinct for decades from their natural nesting areas.
Certainly no one had documented a Kittlytz sighting in recent times.
While looking for ptarmigan, Kaler stumbled on a Kittlytz’s and its nest during his first summer‘s work. He photographed it and later received confirmation it was a Kittlytz’s Murrelet.
“This represented the second nest located for the species from the Aleutians,” Kaler said. “The Kittlytz’s is always associated with glaciers, found either foraging in bays influenced by tidal glaciers and we knew they had seen birds throughout the Aleutians.”
Biologists suspected the murrelets nested there but hadn’t found nests to confirm it, Kaler said.
The birds have white outer tail feathers to distinguish them from the more populous marbled murrelets. The grayish brown bird is only about 25 centimeters long.
“We decided to put a lot more effort into searching for them the next year, focusing on the breading ecology of the Kittlytz,” he said.
As of 2004, only 23 nests had been described and studied for the Kittlitz’s over its entire nesting range, with single nests scattered in space and time, Kaler wrote in his 2008 progress report.
This murrelet apparently “uses the strategy of dispersed nesting in areas with sparse or no vegetation, typically at relatively high elevations.” They nest high to avoid predation.
The summers’ work at Agattu involved discovering and videographing a small breeding population of 17 nests. The camera was camouflaged on rocks and operated by detecting motion.
Kaler hopes, if funding comes through, to complete a comprehensive four-year work monitoring the characteristics of the nest sites, quantify breeding chronology, determine chick growth rates, nestling diet and adult nesting patterns, looking at survival and reproductive rates, and to collect genetic samples.
So far, the biologists have found reproductive success was low and growth was slow, meaning the birds have few young and the young do not amass weight quickly.
“The young are dying of either exposure to the elements or starvation or perhaps the food brought to them is low in fat quality. They are not able to put on a lot of tissue to help them thermal regulate on their own,” Kaler found.

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