National Geographic

or scrambling to take flight would scule with aneighbor. But the disputes ended as suddenly asthey started, the birds resuming their groomingas if nothing had happened.“Murres do what murres do,” Warzybokremarked. “They aren’t the brightest birds.”What murres do is exercise devotion. Althoughdivorce is not unheard of, they form strong pairbonds and may live for 30 years or longer, return-ing every year to the same tiny territory and rais-ing one chick. Parents share incubation dutiesequally, one of them remaining in the colonywhile the other ranges over the ocean and divesunderwater for anchovies, juvenile rockfish, orwhatever else is available. When a bird returnsfrom a long foraging trip, the parent that hasstayed behind—increasingly hungry and streakedwith guano—is still reluctant to leave the egg. Inthe local lore of murres, there’s an anecdote of amother whose egg rolled downhill as soon as shelaid it. A gull came by and swallowed it, stood fora moment with an enormous lump in its throat,and then regurgitated the egg, which rolled far-ther downslope and hit a standing murre, whichpromptly climbed onto it and began to incubate it.“If they don’t have an egg,” Warzybok said,“they’ll incubate a stone or a piece of vegetation.They’ll lay a fish on anunhatched egg, tryingto feed it. And theywon’t give up. They’llsit on a dead egg for 75or 80 days.”Murre chicks take tothe water when they’rebarely three weeks old,too young to fly or dive.Their fathers go withthem and stay by theirside for months, feed-ing them and teachingthem to fish while theirmothers, which havemade a heavy caloricinvestment in produc-ing eggs, go of by themselves to recover. Parentaldevotion and the equal division of labor pay div-idends. The reproductive success rate of Farallonmurres is very high, typically above 70 percent,and they’re one of the most abundant breedingseabirds in North America. Immense though itwas, the colony that Warzybok and I were visitingheld less than 5 percent of the islands’ murres.Seabirdsbreed onforbiddingislands andlive ininhospitablewaters. If theydisappeared,how manypeople wouldeven notice?The murre population today represents a pro-visionally happy ending to a long, sad story. Twohundred years ago, as many as three millionmurres bred in the Farallons. In 1849, when thegold rush made San Francisco a boomtown, theislands became an inviting target for a city with-out a poultry industry. By 1851, the Farallone EggCompany was gathering half a million murre eggsa year for sale to bakeries and restaurants. Itseggers arrived by boat in the spring, crushed theeggs that had already been laid, and proceededto collect every freshly laid one. Over the nexthalf century, at least 14 million murre eggs wereharvested on the Farallons. The birds’ fidelity totheir nest sites kept them coming back, year afteryear, to be robbed of the objects of their devotion.By 1910, fewer than 20,000 murres remainedon the main island. Even after egging stopped,they fell victim to the cats and dogs introducedby the keepers of the island’s lighthouse, andlarge numbers were killed at sea by oil flushedfrom the tanks of ships entering San FranciscoBay. The murre population didn’t seriouslyrecover until after 1969, when the main islandbecame a federal wildlife refuge. And then, inthe early 1980s, the population plunged again.The problem was the indiscriminate fishingmethod known as gillnetting. Hauling a huge netto the surface of the ocean sweeps up not onlythe target fish but also porpoises, otters, turtles,and diving seabirds. Today at least 400,000seabirds are killed worldwide every year in gillnets—murres and puins and diving ducks innorthern waters, penguins and diving petrelsof the coast of South America. The annual tollon murres alone may equal the 146,000 killed inthe 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.Beginning in the mid-1980s, many Americanstates, including California, took note of the eco-logical havoc and imposed severe restrictions oroutright bans on gillnetting. The result, in theFarallons, was a surge in seabird numbers. In thepast 15 years, safe from gillnetting, and free to dowhat they do, the murres have quadrupled theirpopulation. The only threat to their survival inthe Farallons now is the disruption of their foodsource by climate change or overfishing.Pete Warzybok, perched in the blind, was writ-ing down the species of fish that the murres inhis study plot brought back to their nests. To aCalifornia fisherman asked to share the ocean’sbounty with seabirds—Farallon murres consumemore than 50,000 tons of fish every summer—the122 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC