Federal Researchers Probe Mystery of Starving Maine Seabirds

[jpak]

http://www.mpbn.net/Home/tabid/36/ctl/ViewItem/mid/3478/ItemId/19184/Default.aspx

If you're a tern chick, there's nothing better than the sight of mama, arriving with a beak full of fish. To grow, and ultimately survive, these baby shorebirds need steady access to the Atlantic herring that swim the cold waters of the Gulf of Maine in schools. Even with a steady diet of herring, only about half of all tern chicks born annually on Maine islands survive. This past year, though, something went wrong. About two-thirds of all baby terns died, many from starvation. Jay Field takes a look at what might be killing them.

For a few years now, student researchers with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have been setting up shop on islands off the coast of Maine for 12 to 15 weeks at a time. They've been looking at how productive the birds are, and at what they're eating.

"And some years, they're able to find herring quite readily and other years it's kind of hard for them to come by," says Brian Benedict, the deputy refuge manager at the Maine Coastal Islands National Wildlife Refuge.

Benedict says this has been one of those "other years." He says researchers have watched as adult terns have swooped in with beakfulls of butterfish instead of herring.

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[Old and In the Way]

1. A bad, bad sign.....

if the herring stocks are depleted/gone...the whole food chain, fish and bird, are in trouble.

[jpak]

2. Yup - I talked to several fisherman Downeast this summer - the herring are down deep

presumably seeking cooler waters

not good

[AtheistCrusader]

3. Quite ominous.

Surface water temps? Overfishing? Combination?

[phantom power]

4. perhaps if we quit strip-mining the fish, acidifying the oceans, dumping fertilizer runoff,

and blowing out our deep sea oil wells...

oh, never mind.