National Geographic

as invasive predators and commercial fishingthreaten their existence, they need people toprotect them; and it’s difficult to care aboutanimals you can’t see.THE FARALLONS TODAY are a small por-tal to the past, when seabirds were abundanteverywhere. More than half a million birds werenesting in the refuge when I visited the mainisland in June 2017. On steep slopes and sparselyvegetated level ground, surrounded by deep-blue water roiling with seals and sea lions, werepuins and guillemots and cormorants, tinyplump Cassin’s auklets, weirdly horned rhinoc-eros auklets, and, in my opinion, way too manywestern gulls. The gull chicks were hatching,and it was impossible to walk anywhere with-out enraging their parents, which screamed atA lone common murreflies above thousandsmore tending eggsand young in the Faral-lon Islands off Califor-nia. Decimated in the19th century by egghunters supplying SanFrancisco’s markets, thepopulation sufferedanother collapse in theearly 1980s because ofgillnetting— the use oflarge nets that trap sea-birds and other wildlifeas well as the target fish.Since the mid-1980s,restrictions or outrightbans on gillnetting haveallowed the Farallonmurres to thrive again.PHOTOGRAPHIC COVERAGE FOR THIS ARTICLE WAS SUPPORTED BY THE PAUL M. ANGELL FAMILY FOUNDATION,THE SOUTH AFRICAN NATIONAL ANTARCTIC PROGRAMME, AND THE DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL AFFAIRS, SOUTH AFRICA.ear-hurting volumes and jumped into the air tostrafe intruders with evil-smelling excrement.The gulls were a gantlet worth running toreach the island’s colonies of common murres.One morning, Pete Warzybok, a biologist withPoint Blue, the conservation group that helps theU.S. Fish and Wildlife Service monitor wildlifeon the Farallons, led me up to a plywood blindoverlooking a murre metropolis. Like a blanketof coarsely ground pepper, 20,000 black-and-white birds covered a sloping spit of rock thatbottomed out in surf-splashed clifs. The murreswere standing shoulder to shoulder, pointybilled, penguin-like, and incubating an egg orguarding a tiny chick on territories as small asa few square inches. The colony had an air ofquiet industry. There were occasional outburstsof gentle clucking, and the menacing gulls keptsailing over, scanning for breakfast opportuni-ties, and sometimes a murre landing awkwardly``````National Geographicis partnering withthe National Audu-bon Society, BirdLifeInternational, and theCornell Lab of Orni-thology to celebratethe centennial of theMigratory Bird TreatyAct. Watch for morestories, books, andevents throughoutthe year.``````CELEBRATING THEYEAR OF THE BIRD``````117