Birdseye's View on Marbled Murrelets

Protecting wildlife is significant in the bigger picture because … "we don't want to be the keystone species that collapses our own ecosystem with arrogance."

This from Kari Birdseye, the National Press Secretary / Associate Media Director of Earthjustice.

Earthjustice is a non-profit public interest law organization dedicated to protecting the magnificent places, natural resources, and wildlife of this earth, and to defending the right of all people to a healthy environment.

The quotation (above and below) were taken from a Q&A with Kari Birdseye posted on Earthjustice's website in 2013, the 40th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act (ESA).  I missed this when it came out, and chances are, so did you.

 

One thing most people don't know about the ESA but should is … that way back in 1973, the House Committee Report on the bill that eventually became the ESA said it best, almost poetically:

"Man's presence on the Earth is relatively recent, and his effective domination over the world's life support systems has taken place within a few short generations. Our ability to destroy, or almost destroy, all intelligent life on the planet became apparent only in this generation. A certain humility, and a sense of urgency, seem indicated."

So now, in the Endangered Species Act's 41st year, how about less arrogance  and more humility and urgency!

My Favorite Book Reviewers

Before I began writing non-fiction for the general (adult) audience, I published a dozen non-fiction books--natural history mostly--for young readers. 

Two of my most popular books for young readers were Firefighting: Behind the Scenes and The Ultimate Ocean Book. Both were published in the 1990s and, before they went out of print, I bought up enough copies to have a stash on hand for some future gift or some special reader. 

This young decked out firefighter fan (above) in Germany was one of them. Getting this photo made my day...as did this next one (below).

Though the paper engineer should really get the credit for this reaction, this reader's excitement makes me smile.

 Over the years, I have visited elementary schools to give presentations on how books like the ones (above) are made--how the writer, editors, designers, paper engineers, photographers, printers, binders, and publishers collaborate to transform an idea into something tangible, possibly magical. I share my stories of researching and writing about a particular topic and pass around my messy notebooks, outlines, and heavily edited printed drafts.

After such presentations, I often receive hand-written thank-you notes from the students. Nowhere except in an elementary school will an author talk to an audience of twenty-five people and get rave reviews from every single one! 

Here are four of my favorites--all written in inch-high block print in pencil and on wide lined paper.

Dear Mrs. Ruth,

Thank you for showing us all the books and the firefight Book was so good and it was so good that I wanted it so much!

  Sincerely, Nadia.

Dear Mrs. Mudd Ruth,

Thank you for visiting Brooke Grove. Thank you for showing us those cool books and helping us learn that grownups make mistakes. I like to write about animals.

Sincerely, Keith

Dear Mrs, Mudd Ruth

Thank you for coming to our school. I think all of your books are great and the books you have written were good. I really enjoyed your books. My favorite book is the Ultimate Ocean Book because it looks good to me. Mrs. Ruth I think the whale looks nice to me in the picture.

Thank you, Monica

Dear Mrs. Mudd Ruth

Thank for visiting our school. I liked the Ocean book. I liked it because it was a pop up book. It was so good my eyes popped out. Thank you very much.

Sincerely, Danny

The Marbled Murrelet Diet

We all try to do the right thing most of the time, but sometimes we find ourselves unable to make the best right decision.

I am a loyal supporter of Olympia's fabulous Farmers' Market, which has just decided to extend its April-December season by opening up on Saturdays year long. My husband and I went down to the market Saturday in the pouring rain. We decided too make a meal of whatever local, fresh produce was available right then. We bought kale and carrots and then hunted for some protein. We found it: smoked salmon mostly and some very fresh-looking fish we found out were smelt. Smelt!

 That's one of the many prey species of the marbled murrelet! These are small, schooling fish also known as forage fish. Forage fish!

Forage fish around the globe are suffering from overfishing. There is a global crisis happening right now as  forage fish populations are declining at alarming rates. Many forage fish never appear in restaurants, but are ground up to make animal feed and fertilizer--which apparently we need in unsustainable quantities.

The normally abundant forage fish are a critical link between the ocean phytoplankton  and zooplankton and many seabirds, larger fish, and marine mammals. The fish marbled murrelets commonly prey on includes sardines, anchovies, juvenile herring, saury, and sandlance, and smelt. But I wondered...were the smelt actually one of the over-fished species?

Luckily I had my wallet-size Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch guide with me.  Unfortunately smelt wasn't on the list of "best choices," "good alternatives," or "avoid." Hmmm....so we bought eight fish for $3 and were told to fry them and eat them whole.

The light breading of the smelt.

The frying in olive oil of half the smelt without heads as another than myself wasn't sure he wanted to eat the whole fish the way a murrelet would. Note: these smelt are probably twice the size of any a murrelet could handle.

Two fried smelt on a bed of local greens. Please ignore the exotic lemon wedge. These fish were delicious and entirely edible. But still...

So we ate our dinner--savoring our first smelt from the Pacific Northwest and sauteed kale from a local vendor at our local Farmers' Market. We also ate some leftover rice and beans to round out the meal. But I had a nagging feeling that my willful ignorance about the smelt situation. I looked again at my fish-buying guide to see if I had overlooked the smelt--no I hadn't. But I did see a note that due to the size of the guide (wallet-sized), the full list of recommendations is posted at seafoodwatch.org. I searched for "smelt" and up came a page of different kinds of smelt.

Here is what I learned: I should avoid eulcahon, also known as smelt, caught in British Columbia in conical or seine nets, and that smelt, also known as eulachon, wild caught and certified by the Marine Stewardship Council, were a good alternative. Hmmm....what had my husband and I bought? Were were our smelt/eulachon caught and how? Ii could find no information on the smelt purveyor online.

I Googled "eulachon Pacific Northwest fisheries" and discovered--to my dismay--that in 2010, the population of eulachon from the U.S.-Canada border south to include Washington, Oregon, and California, was listed by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as a threatened species under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. I hunted for the NOAA seafood-buying guide, but did not find one on this otherwise excellent website.

Now what? What did this threatened status mean for the dinner table? Were all Pacific eulachon in the listed range off limits to fishing?

I went back to the NOAA site and read that they designated 16 specific areas as critical habitat within California, Oregon, and Washington--an area of freshwater creeks, rivers, and their associated estuaries totaling 335 mles) of habitat. And that  the "Tribal lands of four Indian Tribes are excluded from designation after evaluating the impacts of designation and benefits of exclusion associated with Tribal land ownership and management by the Tribes." The four tribes are the Lower Elwha Tribe, Quinault Tribe, Resighini Rancheria, or Yurok Tribe.

Given that there is a chance that  tribal fisherman--possibly Quinault--supplied our smelt to the seafood retailer at the Farmers' Market. I couldn't find this kind of information about the retailer online so, I will just have to hold off on another smelt fry until I can get back down to the market to find out. Or spend another hour researching this on the Internet.

Depending on what I learn, will I buy more smelt? Should I support the Farmers' Market and the local fishing industry (and get a load of delicious protein with Omega 3s for $3) or should I find some better source of protein with less environmental impact? Can I offset my smelt purchase by biking or taking the bus to the market? By making a contribution to a marine-conservation group? By tracking down non-GMO tofu monger and learning to love "soylent white?"

I am sure you are shaking your head, wondering why anyone should worry about eating a "threatened" forage fish every once in a while? Well, as I used to say to my kids when they wanted to bring home a rock from a national park, "What if everybody did that?" 

Window Crashes and Birds

Just as I was sitting down at my desk to start working on my book on clouds, I heard a loud thud from downstairs. I know my house sounds well and knew it was not the sound of the antique writing desk warping, but of a bird hitting the picture window in the front of my house.

I ran outside to find the bird beneath the window and though I had had a success last summer encouraging a window-stunned bird back to life, this bird had clearly broken its neck and died within a few minutes of my finding it.

It was a Varied Thrush--one of my favorite birds of the Pacific Northwest. A bird I first heard while surveying Marbled Murrelets in the old-growth forests at dawn. This thrush's song is a strange one--a buzzy hum at different pitches. A group of thrushes sounds like someone impersonating a spaceship landing. In the forest at dawn, it was surreal. You can hear the call anywhere, anytime here.

Varied Thrushes are about as hard to spot as a Marbled Murrelet in the forest, but the thrushes are common in my suburban neighborhood where there are plenty of shady coniferous woods for them. Still, it wasn't until a few summers of living in Olympia that I was able to track the strange song an actual bird. One. In a Douglas-fir in my backyard. They are well camouflaged and seem to prefer singing from near the tops of the towering trees.

I didn't expect to see a thrush this early in the year--I always associate them with the end of winter along with the greening Indian Plum in the forest understory. So, with this first thrush and this first window crash of the season, I am determined to figure out how to reduce the fatalities for the rest of 2014. Though I love seeing the birds out my picture windows, I stopped feeding the birds with feeders as even the Varied Thrush will feed on the ground below feeders. I am planning to make my windows less reflective so other birds don't attempt to fly through them. It doesn't make sense to create an environment that enhances our bird-watching pleasure if it is fatal to the birds we are attempting to attract.

If you have this same problem, American Bird Conservancy has some tips here for reducing window crashes. Please send any tried-and-true tips this way.