May 2007 | On Our Radar
More Murres, Please
Julia Parrish Explains Puget Sound, One Bird at a Time
By Paul Constant
In April, People for Puget Sound (www.pugetsound.org), a non-profit organization devoted to educating the public about the environmental health of Puget Sound, hosted a lecture titled Seabird Ecology and Conservation. Though at first that sounds like the kind of thing that would only intrigue hard-core ornithologists, the presentation proved to be a compelling call to action.
“We have to clean up Puget Sound and accommodate for the damage that will be done by the people who are going to move to this region,” says University of Washington Associate Professor of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences Julia Parrish, who in 1998 founded the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST), a team of 500 volunteer citizen scientists whose membership stretches from California to the Bering Sea.
Parrish’s enthusiasm is contagious. She peppers her speech with pop-culture references and has an uncanny ability to as she puts it, “change the letters of conservation around so that we’re having a conversation first.”
Today’s “conversation” isn’t heavy on statistics. Instead, the focus is on one bird’s story and how it reveals that the Sound’s ecosystem has gone, according to Parrish, “catywhompus.” The bird of the hour is the common murre, a brown, medium-sized seabird with white-tipped wings—resembling a loon—that clusters on the cliffs of Puget Sound.
Recent living murre counts are distressing: There are roughly 2,500,000 murres in the Gulf of Alaska, and 100,000 off Oregon’s coast, but only 10,000 off Vancouver’s shores and 15,000 on Washington’s cliffs. Parrish states, “If there were no immigration of murres, Washington’s murre community would probably be extinct.”
One explanation for their decline is that murres are the preferred prey of bald eagles and seagulls—both birds that have garnered human assistance and multiplied in numbers. Right now, murres and their young are being hunted and eaten in disproportionate numbers. Add that to the increasing amount of sludge floating in our Sound and it should come as no surprise that these little white-tipped birds are vanishing fast.
“When there’s a large oil spill, murres will always take it in the shorts,” says Parrish who with COASST, her team of citizen scientists, studies bird carcasses found on the beach or, as Parrish says, “They do the CSI thing.”
It turns out that half to three quarters of the dead birds found in the aftermath of an oil spill are murres. They are the canary in the coalmine of the ocean, and they prove that Puget Sound needs serious attention. In the nine years since COASST was founded, they’ve learned that oil spills—not just tanker crashes, but any amount of oil spilled into the sea—have a devastating effect on the murre community.
“We know that things are changing, and there are casualties,” Parrish says. There is a “dead zone” in the Sound—a stretch of water miles wide without enough oxygen to support life—and it has grown every year since 2005.
Parrish refuses to wallow in gloom and doom, and points out that groups like COASST and People for Puget Sound are making a difference. Last year, citizen scientists worked together with commercial fishermen to save murres and other seabirds from dying in their fishing nets. By avoiding what Parrish declares a “‘You’re bad’ approach,” scientists and fishermen devised a visible nylon mesh panel in their monofilament nets that protected the birds from strangulation. The solution worked so well that it was the fishermen who lobbied Olympia to make the nets mandatory.
Parrish advocated citizen involvement through a program of observation, assessment, public education and change, pointing out that ordinary citizens “are often more successful than the scientists” in getting the word out about the need for stricter environmental stewardship. People for Puget Sound are committed to these goals, and information about membership, as well as upcoming talks and events including a cleanup of Jetty Island on May 19, is online at www.pugetsound.org.
What Counts?
Compiled by Jenny Rough
5000: Estimated number of years yoga has been practiced as a discipline of breathing techniques, body postures and meditation.
1500: Yoga poses recorded in ancient texts written in Sanskrit, Urdu and Persian.
18-24: Age group in America where yoga is growing the fastest (about 3 million American adults practiced yoga at least twice a week in 2006).
80: Percentage of American yoga students that are women.
105: Degrees Fahrenheit that is the recommended room temperature for Bikram yoga.
$2.95 Billion: Dollars Americans spent on yoga classes, retreats, books, DVDs, mats, clothing and related items in 2004 (most recent poll).
$75,000+: Average single income of American yoga participant, ( 2006 YogaWorks survey).
$15: Average cost (USD) of a drop-in yoga class in the Bay Area.
34.7: Percentage of India’s population living on less than $1 USD per day (1999-2000 survey).
100,000: Estimated number of people in 15 countries around the world who participate in the annual World Laughter Day, May 1, organized by Laughter Yoga International.
1,280,000: Number of Google listings for the search term yoga changed my life.
Sources: USA Today, CIA’s World Factbook, HolisticOnline.com, 2006 YogaWorks survey, Yoga Journal, Mediamark Research, Google.com, BikramYoga.com, San Francisco Bay Guardian, World Bank, LaughterYoga.org.
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