Peeing off a skiff and other adventures of a seabird biologist

Besides using a table saw and operating a crane, one of the many unexpected skills I’ve picked up as a biologist is peeing off a skiff in the middle of the night. Think about it… you are wearing thick rubber bibs and boots, the boat is rocking in the swell, and it’s pitch black outside. The cold ocean spray on your face is a reminder of the high stakes. It also didn’t help that I was usually in a boat full of men that didn’t understand the hold-up.

I found myself in this predicament because I was out on the water counting birds. Scripps’s murrelets, to be exact, a rare black and white seabird about the size of an eggplant. Murrelets spend most of their lives out at sea, where they find their food, and they come to land once a year to nest in sea caves, under shrubs, and on steep cliffsides. Their nests are terribly hard to find, and we hardly ever get to see the chicks since they tumble down the cliffs to the ocean just two days after hatching. So instead of counting all the nests to get an idea of how many birds are breeding in a given year, we take advantage of another behavior. Murrelets have what is called “social at-sea nocturnal congregations,” which basically means they like to hang out on the water at night. This is why I happened to be in a skiff with a full bladder at night just offshore from a tiny sliver of land known as Anacapa Island in Channel Islands National Park. We were slowly motoring around the island with a high-intensity spotlight. By arcing the spotlight back and forth across the front of the skiff, we could count all the murrelets on the water to get an idea of how many pairs showed up to breed this year.

This technique is now used to monitor murrelets from Mexico to Japan, but it was developed at Anacapa Island by Darrell Whitworth and other seabird biologists. They wanted to know what was going to happen to murrelets after a non-native predator was removed from the island, the black rat. Rats had probably been on Anacapa Island ever since a foggy night in 1853, when the SS Winfield Scott hit the island going full speed and left everyone scrambling for shore. The paying passengers were eventually rescued, and the stowaway rats found plenty to eat in their new home, including murrelet eggs, chicks, and even adults. Little is known about the murrelet population prior to the arrival of rats, but it’s undeniable that this new predator took a toll. In 2001, land managers and biologists decided to use funds from the 1990 American Trader oil spill settlement to remove black rats from the island.

Researchers counted less than 300 murrelets in 2001, just before the rats were gone. Thirteen years later, that number was nearly five times higher, at about 1,400 murrelets in 2014. The murrelet recovery and other efforts in the U.S. and Mexico was so successful that decision makers decided Scripps’s Murrelets didn’t need to be listed under the Endangered Species Act in 2016. It’s also made a compelling case for the benefits of non-native predator removals and helped inspire other projects around the world to conserve seabirds. It’s been twenty years since rats were removed from Anacapa Island, and I’m now working on the beginning stages of a similar rat removal project to benefit seabirds in French Polynesia. I haven’t had to pee off a skiff over there so far, but it’s early days yet.

Amelia J. DuVall spent the last several years getting pooped on while studying seabirds at Channel Islands National Park in southern California. Now a graduate student at the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington, her research is on seabird ecology, conservation, and management across the Pacific Ocean, from the Channel Islands to French Polynesia.