Subject: The problems of gaining information and protecting species
Date: Jul 17 19:40:18 1998
From: Birders2 at aol.com - Birders2 at aol.com


The flollowing was posted to Seabird. To me it illustrates the problem of
gaining the information on how to protect one species and the cost of
obtaining it on another species. Unfortunately, we humans do not know how to
undo are impact on one species without stubbling on another.

Great birding and find that next lifer!

John (One of Birders2)
John + Irma LeVine =2, We are birders, too.

Birders2 at aol.com -- Los Angeles, CA

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
"I wonder what natural beauties we shall have, aside from the mountains and
the sky, a hundred years from now!"

Musing of George H. Lowery Jr., his book LOUISIANA BIRDS, 1995, pg. 355 on
having had the opportunity

The FWD from Seabird:

Daily Astorian [Oregon, USA]
July 10, 1998

Crashing the colony

ANDY DOLAN

RICE ISLAND - Researchers who fitted more than 500 metal leg bands on
Caspian tern chicks on this remote dredge sand island hope the metal cuffs
help both birds and salmon.

But in the midst of the mayhem this week, progress was hard to gauge.

"It's going to be total crazy pandemonium when we go," Oregon State
University researcher Dave Craig warned 25 participants on Monday as they
readied to enter the huge Rice Island nesting colony.

An hour later, downy feathers filled the air as chicks too young to fly ran
into a makeshift plywood pen for collection. Terrified peeps mixed with
screams from adult terns overhead.

By 4 o'clock in the afternoon, workers had tagged 510 chicks. Teams also
recorded weight and wing length and collected vomited pieces of herring and
peamouth the chicks had eaten.

OSU researchers found 8,000 nesting pairs of terns on the Rice Island colony
ate between 5 and 20 million salmon smolt in 1997. A cormorant colony on the
island probably ate millions more.

Researchers say the bands - centrally stored at a national laboratory in
Maryland if birds are recaptured - provide vital data about the terns'
migration patterns and health.

The band data is part of a larger $395,000 study of avian predation of
salmon conducted by OSU and the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission.
Teams hope to control the amount of salmon consumed by the voracious
fish-eaters.

Most of the island's roughly 4,000 chicks will leave the island by July 20,
returning only to roost. Local residents will notice the terns from Clatsop
Spit up to Willapa Bay and north. Terns are dapper black and white sea birds
with delicate, angular wings and a bright red beak.

The birds winter off Mexico, as far south as Central and South America, but
researchers aren't sure they return to the Columbia.

"It's not clear whether they return to the estuary or are more scattered
along the coast," said Ken Collis, a commission biologist. "That's another
thing these band returns will tell you."

An unexpectedly high number of tern chicks died during the banding,
surprising researchers and shocking some agency biologists.

Seventy-nine chicks died of heat exhaustion after crowding into the pens
under a hot sun. About 65 died in the first five minutes. Researchers
scrambled to rescue the birds, eventually releasing as many as 700 unbanded
chicks.

The mortality was "way beyond what I feared would happen," Craig said,
adding that he expected only as many as 15 birds to die.

The number of chicks that died "was unacceptably high," said Martin Nugent,
a threatened and endangered species coordinator with the Oregon Department
of Fish and Wildlife.

Researchers will meet with the state and federal agencies that administer
collection permits for terns and cormorants. Possible procedure changes
include putting fewer birds into the pens and banding only during cool
weather.

The dead chicks will contribute to research by serving as subjects for
toxicity studies and other measurements that couldn't be performed on live
birds, Craig said.

"If we had pulled out and done nothing, all we would have done is killed a
bunch of birds, stressed out the whole colony and got no value," he said.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers created Rice Island as a dredge spoil dump
in the late 1970s. Terns, attracted to bare sand, flocked there.

Officials with the National Marine Fisheries Service, the federal agency
charged with protecting endangered salmon, say the island jeopardizes
endangered salmon recovery and recommend immediate action.

The number of smolt lost to terns in 1997 alone will reduce the numbers of
adult salmon returning to the Columbia River in the tens of thousands,
Elizabeth Holmes Gaar, NMFS assistant regional administrator for habitat
conservation, told the Corps in an April 14 letter.

"(T)he river managing agencies cannot afford to spend millions of dollars on
recovery of listed species to feed artificially enhanced predator
populations," Gaar wrote.

A task force assigned to the avian predation problem met a few weeks ago to
discuss possible short-term actions.

Researchers will try to relocate terns to East Sand Island next year, after
studies on cormorants there showed they ate fewer salmon.

Hatchery practices will be evaluated, as will barging tactics. Hatchery
salmon make easy prey, made more vulnerable by barging around dams on the
Columbia and Snake rivers.

The task force also recommended planting vegetation, such as silk plants, on
fresh dredge spoils to discourage nesting.

The Corps does not plan to stop depositing dredge spoils on Rice Island,
said spokesman Steve Stevens. The agency also plans to build pile dikes
nearby. Pile dike fields are known to increase fish foraging by birds
including terns and cormorants.

Previous efforts to vegetate bare spoils have proved unsuccessful, according
to a Corps document.

End.