Mike,

You asked about 'references' to my murrre posting. I'm not certain that I've
seen any printed numbers about Washington's breeding murres - except the
Seattle Times article back on 9 Feb 1994. Ulrich Wilson of the USF&WS was
reported as saying "I think Washington breeding murres have probably been
wiped out," in regards to the 1993 count of murres on our coast only being
565! Mind you, this was following a fairly major El Nino event that summer -
the one that precipitated poor ocean survival for our returning salmon,
brought mackerel into Puget Sound, etc etc.

The figure I gave of about 12K murres in the Washington breeding population
were taken from some notes I'd taken while attending the "Solving Bycatch
Workshop", 25-27 Sept 1995 in conjunction with the Seattle Fish Expo. On the
26th, Dr Julia Parish of the UW Zoology Dept was delivering a status report
on the murres based on her work up around Tatoosh and the rest of Makah land
during a workgroup panel discussion on Seabird Bycatch in Puget Sound
Commercial Net Fisheries.

I haven't seen any reports on the status of the murre colonies in Wash. It
would be good to know whether the USFWS, the University types and the WDFW
seabird folks were sharing that info and getting it to the public. There
seems to be some discrepancies in the numbers being bandied about, and I'd
like to know whether I should be severely concerned and doing something about
it (have they been "wiped out"?), or if the population is just responding to
ocean conditions in the wake of several years of anomalous sea temperatures
(population down to 12K from 30K? Not too big a deal..)?

Dr Parish has an email account at UWashington, but I haven't taken the
opportunity to inquire further about this.

Don't know if this helps, but it's all I have for now.

Jon. Anderson
Olympia, Washington
JAnder6788 at aol.com (temporary address)