NESTING SEABIRDS OF THE GULF OF ALASKA 



65 



that the site of his collecting was Sanak Is- 

 land and this has common acceptance. Several 

 things in his account point to a site which was 

 a small island with several peers close by, but 

 this could not have been Sanak. It could have 

 been an island in the Sanak Island group or it 

 could equally well have been somewhere in the 

 Sandman Reefs. Unfortunately, because of 

 this the record is clouded. There has never 

 been anything approaching a survey of the 

 southern half of the Sandman Reefs. We do 

 not know what breeding colonies are there. 



At any rate, Littlejohn told of the large 

 numbers of Leach's storm-petrels, fork-tailed 

 storm-petrels, auklets (of which only Cassin's 

 is specifically identified), and ancient murre- 

 lets which occupied a large number of small is- 

 lands. He could not calculate the number of 

 breeding murrelets on his small island, the 

 size of which I interpret to have been of the 

 same order of magnitude as two others which 

 he estimated were about 2 acres. He does say 

 that the murrelets must have numbered 

 several thousand and could, if left alone by 

 the Aleuts, have quickly grown too numerous 

 for the island to accommodate. 



Murie (1959) made a brief visit to Sanak in 

 1937 and learned that there were no longer 

 any large colonies of seabirds. He attributes 

 this to exploitation of the fisheries and to the 

 fox-farming industry. Littlejohn told of the 

 repeated visits of Aleuts to his small islands, 

 where they took hundreds of birds each time 

 and all of the eggs they could find. This kind 

 of activity could not help but disrupt the 

 breeding on these islands. 



Littlejohn 's description of the ancient 

 murrelet's nest leaves little doubt that the 

 birds could be reached by fox or rats with 

 ease. The birds showed no particular care in 

 selecting a nest site and often worked their 

 way back no more than about a meter into the 

 dead vegetative cover from preceding years, 

 where they scratched out a shallow nest. 



There are few records of the ancient murre- 

 let from the northern and western Gulf of 

 Alaska. Friedmann (1935) reported the collec- 

 tion of a series of eggs in 1884 on Kodiak Is- 

 land. Chase Littlejohn (Bendire 1895) col- 

 lected eggs from somewhere in the Sanak 

 Group in 1894. In 1908 Dixon (Grinnell 1910) 

 saw a bird in Port Nellie Juan. Several were 

 seen by Jaques (1930) near Belkofski in May 



1928. Gabrielson collected one bird at Cor- 

 dova in September 1941 and another at the 

 Chiswell Islands in July 1945 (Gabrielson and 

 Lincoln 1959). He saw numerous flocks in the 

 Gulf of Alaska on 30 July of an unnamed year. 

 In 1943, he would have been near Cape 

 Spencer on that date. In 1945 he would have 

 been near the Chiswell Islands. In either case, 

 he was probably somewhere in Blying Sound. 



The ancient murrelet is relatively uncom- 

 mon but regularly observed in the inshore 

 waters along the outer coasts of the islands 

 fronting Prince William Sound. FWS surveys 

 in July- August 1972 provided an estimate of 

 almost 1,000 birds, mostly in nonbreeding 

 plumage, along the outer coast of Prince 

 William Sound (Isleib and Kessel 1973). Small 

 numbers were found feeding close to the 

 Wooded Islands on 24 July (my personal ob- 

 servation). Rausch (1958) saw a few off 

 Middleton Island in 1956. Isleib (Isleib and 

 Kessel 1973) saw 400-500 widely distributed 

 at the mouth of Yakutat Bay in July and Au- 

 gust 1968. The only large numbers of ancient 

 murrelets encountered on the FWS survey of 

 the Alaskan Peninsula in 1973 were in the 

 Shumagin Islands. They were very common in 

 East Nagai Strait on 9 June and more than 

 half of the 1,300 seabirds per square nautical 

 mile encountered between Little Koniuji and 

 Chernabura Islands on 11 June were ancient 

 murrelets. At Nagai Island an estimated 

 5,000 ancient murrelets were observed in the 

 west bay at Pirate Shake, and later (on 

 19 June) several were observed in the vicinity 

 of Midun Island (FWS, Anchorage, Alaska, 

 unpublished data). 



On the basis of the observations recounted 

 above, I have to conclude that ancient murre- 

 lets are fairly regularly, if patchily, dis- 

 tributed throughout the northern and western 

 Gulf of Alaska. I do not believe that the void 

 in their range shown for the northern Gulf of 

 Alaska by Udvardy (1963) is correct. Several 

 colonies are there, awaiting discovery. 



Ancient murrelets are not abundant in the 

 Gulf of Alaska but they are certainly more 

 numerous than we have been able to prove. It 

 is not possible to tell from the existing data 

 whether they were once more abundant than 

 they are now. I suspect, on the basis of the 

 Sanak Island experience, that we can con- 

 clude that this species has been reduced in 

 number by various of man's activities. 



