50 



L. W. SOWL 



Current Status 

 Setting the Stage 



This paper should be viewed as a conceptual 

 model. While I attempted to be as objective as 

 possible, subjectivity was unavoidable. Many 

 of the tentative conclusions are based on very 

 little data. Each improvement will make it a 

 better management tool. Because of the space 

 limitations, it is not possible to go into a de- 

 tailed tracking of my reasoning for each 

 species. In an attempt to overcome this handi- 

 cap, I am including some examples of the 

 sorts of reasoning that went into the process. 



In 1973 I led a Fish and Wildlife Service 

 (FWS) reconnaissance survey team that was 

 delineating seabird colonies along the Alaska 

 Peninsula. In the Shumagin Islands we en- 

 tered or crossed Koniuji Strait twice (on 11 

 and 12 June) without even suspecting the 

 presence of a horned puffin colony. A third 

 passage through the strait (13 June) was not 

 so uneventful. The water and the air were 

 filled with horned puffins. This led to the dis- 

 covery that the 430-m mountain on the south- 

 eastern corner of Big Koniuji was also 

 covered with horned puffins, clear to its top. 

 The minimum estimate of the birds that were 

 visible was 140,000. Even this number of 

 birds would make this the largest horned 

 puffin colony ever discovered. David Spencer 

 (personal communication) had noted similar 

 swarms of horned puffins in this strait in 1956 

 while flying sea otter surveys in the area. In 

 1975 a field camp was established at Yukon 

 Harbor, with study of this colony as one of the 

 prime objectives of the investigators. As far 

 as these investigators could tell no such large 

 colony existed there, even though the nesting 

 habitat was still there, unaltered. This sort of 

 event, one of the banes and vagaries of esti- 

 mating seabird numbers, is not rare. 



In 1973, when FWS personnel delineated 

 the colony on the southwestern end of Bird Is- 

 land in the Shumagins, there were estimated 

 to be 43,000 kittiwakes, 24,000 murres, and 

 6,000 cormorants present; no tufted puffins 

 were seen about the colony. The last time (in 

 1970) one of the observers, Edgar Bailey, had 

 visited the colony with Robert Jones, there 

 was an extremely large colony of tufted 

 puffins which Jones (E. Bailey, personal com- 

 munication) estimated at more than 1 million 



birds. We made a particular effort to visit 

 Jude Island, between the Shumagin Islands 

 and the Pavlof Islands, because David 

 Spencer (personal communication) had re- 

 ported once having seen the air over the island 

 filled with an extremely large number of 

 tufted puffins. However, there were no puffins 

 at this colony either. 



Let us examine the facts in context. On 8 

 June we had visited High Island where we had 

 attempted to collect puffin eggs for pesticide 

 analysis, but had been able to find only one 

 egg. Also, there were only 6,000 tufted puffins 

 where George Putney, master/engineer of the 

 Aleutian Tern, had seen much larger numbers 

 in 1972. These two facts could easily be re- 

 lated to explain the current situation because 

 it was still early in the breeding season. The 

 horned puffin observations in Koniuji Strait 

 (11-13 June) were in keeping with this conclu- 

 sion also an indication that these birds had 

 not yet settled down to a full breeding effort. 

 The erratic comings and goings of common 

 puffins (Fratercula arctica) early in the season 

 have been well documented (Lockley 1962). It 

 is an easy step to extend this reasoning to the 

 absence of birds at Bird Island on 11 June, 

 even though fresh signs of the characteristic 

 evidence of tufted puffin occupancy were 

 missing. Jude Island provides a different clue, 

 however. There were 3,000 pigeon guillemots, 

 an unheard-of concentration, apparently 

 occupying abandoned tufted puffin burrows 

 on 15 June. Also, on 7 June we had made a 

 very interesting observation that had no 

 special significance at the time: murres on 

 Spitz Island were occupying little parapets 

 created by mashing down the mouths of 

 puffin burrows which filled the slope above 

 the cliff portion of their colony. 



After looking at all of the observations 

 cited above, I conclude that tufted puffins 

 were greatly reduced in numbers on these 

 sites in 1973 and that they had been absent 

 from the burrows used by the murres and 

 pigeon guillemots for more than the current 

 breeding season. What causes these sorts of 

 changes? I do not know. 



One reason for year-to-year change may be 

 local movements of colonies. Black-legged 

 kittiwakes nest at several places in lower Orca 

 Inlet, Prince William Sound. Counts made at 

 these sites in 1972 and 1974 yielded almost 



