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Birds with Fish: 2025 Year in Review

By Will Kennerley, Faculty Research Assistant, OSU Seabird Oceanography Lab

The Birds with Fish program, a community science initiative run by the OSU Seabird Oceanography Lab, is just completing its fifth calendar year! We’re excited to share a little update on where this program stands, what we’ve found, and where we hope to go in the coming year.

This year was a successful one for Birds with Fish, with the project receiving more than 130 new photo submissions in 2025. These new submissions represent a 35% increase in the size of our diet photo database (Figure 1) – not too bad for a single year! Of course, these submissions only come about thanks to our fantastic group of contributors. Happily, we’ve added eight new, active contributors to the Birds with Fish team during the year, increasing the size of our team. We’re hoping to increase participation further in 2026 and to reach even more nature lovers in Oregon, especially on the South Coast where we’ve so far received comparatively few submissions. Sharing a passion for Oregon’s coastal birds and habitats is a key part of the Birds with Fish program; this new year, we want to encourage you all to tell your friends about why birds and bird conservation are important to you!

Figure 1. Birds with Fish saw a 35% increase in our diet photo database over the course of 2025 (top) and a significant jump in the number of active contributors per year (bottom).

Will, the Birds with Fish project coordinator at OSU, has finished identifying all 2025 photo submissions and the results are pretty incredible! Over the course of the project (440 observations), Birds with Fish has documented a remarkable 39 different coastal bird species feeding on 36 unique prey types! This diversity of both predator and prey has completely blown us away. These numbers really speak to the incredible value of Oregon’s coastal and marine ecosystems for so many different bird species.

In 2025, Pigeon Guillemots were our most commonly documented bird (Figure 2). Other popularly submitted birds include Common Murres, all three cormorants, gulls, terns, and herons. These species exploit an array of coastal habitats, from brackish estuaries to open ocean, and sandy shores to rocky coasts. These species thus provide a great way to monitor changes in prey available in a diverse set habitats all throughout the year.

Figure 2. A Pigeon Guillemot – our most commonly photographed bird of 2025 – and other coastal birds frequently documented this year. Top Left: Pigeon Guillemot with a juvenile flatfish (Roy Lowe). TR: Pelagic Cormorant with prickleback (Greg Courtney). BL: Common Murre with a smelt (David Dessert). MR: Caspian Tern with a Pacific staghorn sculpin (Molly Sultany). BR: Great Blue Heron with a greenling (MariAnna Hinojosa).

Unsurprisingly, the types of prey available to predators can vary greatly with a predator’s foraging habitat. This is something we can begin to examine ourselves in those species with lots of observations. A preliminary look at our data show that the most common prey item for Pigeon Guillemots along the Oregon Coast is sculpin (Family Cottidae), shown below in Figure 3 in blue. However, it’s interesting to note that the secondary prey of Pigeon Guillemots varies by habitat; in estuarine areas like Yaquina and Tillamook Bays, guillemots are seen feeding on flatfishes 22% of the time. However, in marine environments like Haystack Rock, guillemots also feed frequently on juvenile rockfishes (Sebastes spp.). As our data set increases in size, we’ll be able to look into habitat-prey relationships for more species, and hopefully even track how these might change over time, as well.

Figure 4. Preliminary looks at Birds with Fish data show that Pigeon Guillemot diet varies by habitat. While all guillemots in Oregon seem to feed heavily on sculpins, those foraging in estuarine habitats also feed heavily on flatfishes. In marine environments, juvenile rockfishes are also commonly fed upon. This likely reflects the relative abundance of these different fish types within these respective habitats.

This is a great illustration of the value of community science – when we have more participants sampling at more locations, we’re able to capture more of the tremendous variability in seabird diets. As the years go on, it’s become increasingly clear that this is more than any professional team could do alone. With continued community support and involvement, we hope our sample sizes will continue to increase and more people will join our collaborative effort to learn more about seabirds together.

From all of us at Birds with Fish, thank you for your participation! Our project wouldn’t exist without everyone’s dedication and it’s been so much fun getting to see all of the incredible photographs that have been submitted from up and down the Oregon Coast. We’re wishing everyone a happy holidays and we’re excited to continue learning more about Oregon’s coastal birds in the New Year!

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Yaquina Head End of Season Update, Summer 2025

By Will Kennerley, Faculty Research Assistant, OSU Seabird Oceanography Lab

The cliffs and offshore rocks of Yaquina Head have quieted down now after another summer. The 2025 seabird monitoring season wrapped up around the start of September with the fledging of our final monitoring nests. The last Common Murre chicks fledged around the 20th of August and the cormorant creches were thinning out by Labor Day. All in all, it was a successfully average year – all four of our monitored species (COMU, PECO, BRAC, and WEGU) fledged chicks at or near average rates. This is a significant improvement from the 2024 season for Common Murres and Pelagic Cormorants, and a slight decrease for Brandt’s Cormorants and Western Gulls. Ocean conditions, likewise, appeared fairly typical, with mostly average nearshore sea surface temperatures during most of the breeding season and an ENSO neutral North Pacific (now transitioning to La Niña).

Perhaps most interestingly, our prediction that murres would breed successfully proved correct. Roughly since the 2014-2016 NE Pacific Marine Heatwave (“the Blob”), the murres at Yaquina Head have been successfully raising chicks each odd-numbered year, and failing in even-numbered years. The reasoning for this pattern remains hard to confirm, but we suspect reduced prey availability – perhaps driven by biennial patterns in pink salmon populations – leads to murres entering the breeding period in poorer body condition.

Figure 1. Common Murre productivity (mean chicks produced per nesting attempt) at Yaquina Head, 2007-2025. Note that productivity since “the Blob” (shaded orange) has been highly variable, with exceptionally low productivity during even-numbered years.

Part of this response likely involves the eagles at Yaquina Head. Predation and disturbance from Bald Eagles leads to murres temporarily abandoning their nests, inviting nest predation by local Western Gulls and corvids. This dynamic is especially critical during egg laying as nests first get established on the colony.  In years when the colony fails, eggs are eaten nearly as quickly as they are laid. During successful years, eagles still cause disturbances, but murres appear to be more resilient and less likely to leave their nests en masse. This process is hard for us to document, especially in the months before egg laying. Next time you visit Yaquina Head, please keep an eye out for our new photo point exhibit (soon to be installed on the stairway down to the tidepools) and send us a picture following the posted instructions! This photo point is a part of CoastSnap and we are hoping to use the photographs to better understand how early season colony attendance, especially from February through May, translates to Common Murre breeding success.

Figure 2. Early-season predator disturbances can keep murres on the water, away from prospecting and egg-laying at the colony, potentially delaying reproduction and impacting overall productivity. We’re hopeful that community science efforts like CoastSnap can help us better understand the effect of murre colony attendance patterns.

This year, while we observed 47 predator-caused disturbances to the murres, the scale of these disturbances (% of the colony cleared and overall duration of the disturbance) was less than the five-year average. Paired with another year of seemingly reliable prey sources (predominantly smelt), this led to the Yaquina Head murres hatching 49% of the eggs they laid and fledging 50% of chicks. Overall, this led to an average productivity (eggs fledged per nest, averaged across our plots) of 0.40, well above our 10-year average (0.19 chicks fledged/nest) but almost precisely the average of our last three odd-numbered years (0.41 chicks fledged/nest).

This odd-even pattern of murre reproduction does not hold at the nearby Pirate Cove colony in Depoe Bay, where eagle disturbance is generally less. Murre productivity there was 0.76 chicks fledged/nest and productivity is typically more consistent than at Yaquina Head. This supports the idea that the pattern of murre productivity might well be driven by a bottom-up factor but is likely mediated by predator disturbance.

Figure 3. Murres have successfully bred consistently at the nearby Pirate Cove colony, even on flat, exposed areas of the colony. This is due to lower rates of disturbance from Bald Eagles and other predators at this colony than at Yaquina Head, despite lying just 10 miles north. This suggests predator disturbance interacts with bottom-up factors to create the odd-even pattern of murre productivity being observed at Yaquina Head but not at Pirate Cove.

We’re hopeful that additional monitoring data will help reveal the causes of the intriguing odd-even year pattern of murre productivity. One new development at Pirate Cove is that we documented at least nine Pelagic Cormorant chicks being predated by Bald Eagles, despite generally lesser predator disturbance at this site. Is this the start of increasing eagle predation pressure here, too? Is there a reason the eagles here seem to be impacting the reproductive success of Pelagic Cormorants more than that of Common Murres? As often happens, additional data only leads to new questions, and we’re already looking forward to next year, hopeful that we’ll have a better understanding of the ever-changing top-down and bottom-up factors that influence seabird reproductive success.

As always, many, many, thanks to our various funders and supporters, including the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Science Foundation, Environment for the Americas, and the Friends of Yaquina Lighthouses.

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Time for Tufted Puffins: Waiting for Birds with Bill Loads

By Jayden Washington Samuels, 2025 Tufted Puffin Photography Technician

The puffin is arguably one of the most iconic and recognizable seabird species on the planet. It’s one of the very few bird species that crosses over that imaginary chasm out of the birder world into the mainstream, where even those who aren’t in any way interested in birds, know what a puffin is. However, it isn’t exactly common knowledge that there are nesting populations of puffins in the Pacific Northwest. People typically associate the word puffin with only the Atlantic Puffin species, which is not found anywhere near the West coast. Here in Oregon, we have the Tufted Puffin, which happens to be the largest of the four technical puffin species (Tufted, Horned, Atlantic, and Rhinoceros Auklet).

A trio of tufted puffins flying by Haystack Rock, Oregon

The Tufted Puffin is a pretty widespread bird, as its range stretches from the islands and open ocean off of California all the way up to the coasts of Alaska, Russia, and northern Japan. Cannon Beach—a major stronghold for the population in Oregon—is one of the most accessible locations to observe Tufted Puffins, as they utilize burrows they’ve created in the grassy top of Haystack Rock. Unfortunately, the southern population of Tufted Puffins has seen a sharp decline, and due to their typical clutch size of one egg per season, it’s incredibly hard to bolster their populations. 

Many individuals—ranging from conservation biologists to local volunteers—have lended a helping hand in observing the Cannon Beach Tufted Puffin population, in order to understand the rate of decline and breeding success. The data gathered from these projects helps spread awareness for the vulnerable status of the Tufted Puffins

This is where I come in! I am a senior studying Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). I have been a birder and wildlife photographer for almost seven years now, and in my years at UCSC I have focused my studies and fieldwork on birds, and I have been able to be a part of incredible bird research endeavors like remote work in the Sierra Nevada mountain range focused on Sierra Nevada Gray-Crowned Rosy Finches, Peregrine Falcon breeding success and toxicology in the Greater Bay Area, and songbird banding at Younger Lagoon. 

A photographer standing in the ocean looking towards Haystack Rock.
A photographer on the beach

The goal of this specific project is to figure out the diet composition of Tufted Puffins in Oregon in order to have a better idea of what prey species they depend on, and if there’s any sort of linkage between their diet to their diminishing population status. 

The “How” of this project lies within a combination of having the proper gear to capture these amazing birds in flight—with fish in their bills (called a “bill load”), and in my eyes, a bit of luck to be present for said moment. The Sony A9 with the matching 200-600mm lens + the 1.4x Teleconverter gave me an excellent combination of industry leading autofocus and frames per second with the reach needed to see the puffins up close. My experience preceding this project with a similar camera setup allowed me to settle in pretty quickly; so the only variables that controlled my success was the amount of puffins returning fish to their young and tide/weather variation. 

This project has been ongoing for three years prior to me, and in two of those three years the average number of bill loads per season was just over 100. Last year had the most bill loads being almost three times these typical numbers. This season, I ended up not getting anywhere near as many bill loads as prior years. According to Tim Halloran, a long time volunteer who has done Tufted Puffin burrow counts for over a decade, many burrows appeared to be left unused or unsuccessful this season, meaning less chicks and in turn, less bill load photo opportunities for me.

In previous seasons the mornings seemed more productive for bill load photos. This year the evenings were significantly more productive, especially an hour or two right before sunset. My highest number of bill loads in a day ended up being 10 bill loads on a mid-July evening, and my lowest were a couple 1-3 day stretches with zero bill loads sighted. If I had to give at least one reason why there would be a lower occurrence of bill loads, I think that the Bald Eagles might have at least some effect. While I never observed one catching a Tufted Puffin, they did repeatedly go for, and catch the Common Murres which also call the rock home. I would say 80-90% of my mornings and evenings out on the beach I at least observed two Bald Eagles, and I documented 12 separate “disturbances” to the colony linked to them attempting to prey on birds sitting on the rock.

A bald eagle holds onto a common murre while in flight.

A key part of this project that I enjoyed was the public interaction. I was able to engage with many visitors and locals alike, and I loved educating the public on the Tufted Puffins. My conversations ranged from giving out tips for telling the difference between puffins and murres in flight, to giving people their first look at some on the rock by lending them my binoculars. Even though this project focuses on Tufted Puffins, I was able to get a pretty decent number of Common Murre bill loads, as they also return full prey to their colonies! Something interesting about the murres is that they only carry one fish in each bill load, which is in stark contrast to the puffins who can have countless fish in their bills at once. 

A common murre with a single fish.

I am incredibly grateful to have been selected to be a part of this project, blending two of my greatest passions—birds and photography—into a research endeavor. I never thought I would personally be able to use my skills in Wildlife Photography in a dedicated research setting! 


I would like to sincerely thank Dr. Rachael Orben and Will Kennerley for this incredible opportunity.

Acknowledgments: In 2025, the Tufted Puffin Internship was supported by the Oregon Conservation and Recreation Fund. The Friends of Haystack Rock supported this project by providing intern housing in Seaside and Cannon Beach.

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Yaquina Head Mid-Season Update, Summer 2025

By Cherish Lyda, Seabird Monitoring Technican, OSU Seabird Oceanography Lab

An image on a sunny day of an off-shore rock, Main Colony Rock at Yaquina Head, covered with guano. The nesting seabirds are small and hard to see.

Hello everyone!

My name is Cherish Lyda, and I’m a senior at Oregon State University, majoring in Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences with a focus on avian conservation and management. This summer, I’m the Yaquina Seabird Monitoring Technician for the Seabird Oceanography Lab. This is my first season working with seabirds – and it has been amazing so far!

Despite frequent Bald Eagle disturbances, Yaquina Head Outstanding Natural Area is once again bursting with new life! Although nesting started late this year, the birds have shown resilience and are beginning to proudly display their chaotic nests and adorable chicks. We are currently monitoring 13 plots and following 93 Common Murre nests, 36 Brandt’s Cormorant nests, 28 Pelagic Cormorant nests, and 13 Western Gull nests.

Western Gulls hatched first and are already wrapping up the season with seven successfully fledged nests. (Take a look at the top of Colony Rock and you’ll see these brown spotted fluff balls wandering around!) Brandt’s Cormorants started hatching on July 2nd and 21 nests have hatched so far with more on the way. Pelagic Cormorants have taken up their usual spots at Smuggler’s Cove and Whale Rock, and we saw our first chick on July 9th.

A close-up image of a mixed species seabird colony with clusters of nesting common murres and a few Brandt's cormorants.
Common Murres and Brandt’s Cormorants at Pirate Cove, Depoe Bay. Note the chick in the center cormorant nest.

As for the Common Murres, their season started out tough but is now looking very promising. Frequent early-season eagle activity hit the south half of Colony Rock and top of Whale Rock hard, clearing multiple plots of eggs. For a couple days, two immature Bald Eagles were seen perching continuously on the rocks. However, as eagle activity dropped off in late June, the murres regrouped and began laying again (along with lots of Brandt’s Cormorants) in the center and south parts of Colony Rock. The decrease in disturbances seems to have bolstered the murres’ courage, and they are starting to stay on their eggs during disturbances. Instead of flushing in panic, they’re standing their ground. It’s risky, but it seems to be paying off with fewer eggs being lost to the surrounding gulls.

We confirmed our first murre chicks on July 14th and we are now up to 25+ hatched with many more on the way. The parents are now busy bringing fish to colony, and it’s been cute watching the murres attempt to feed their eggs small fish – a sign that they are getting close to hatching!

A view through a scope of common murres, centered on a murre chick and its parents.
Young Common Murre chick at Depoe Bay

As for other avian species, Tufted Puffins continue to make occasional, delightful fly-bys. We’ve seen both single birds and a pair flying loops and heading north. The noisy Black Oystercatchers have been busy with nests at both field sites and Pigeon Guillemots are on their nests tucked deep into the cliffs of Smuggler’s Cove. Listen for their high-pitched, squeaky whistles coming from the rocks!

In addition to Yaquina Head, we have been keeping a close eye on Pirate Cove in Depoe Bay. With almost no eagle disturbance (none since mid-June), the birds have been doing great. As of this writing, 42 of our 97 murre nests have hatched. Amazingly, every one of our 31 Brandt’s Cormorant nests have hatched chicks! Although our Pelagic Cormorants have been nesting in some hard-to-see cliffs, we were able to confirm their first hatches this last week as well.

A pelagic cormorant brooding a very tiny chick on a large well built nest of vegetation and guano.
Pelagic Cormorant with its first chick nesting at Smuggler’s Cove, Yaquina Head.

Now that murre chicks have arrived, we’ll soon be conducting all-day nest watches to observe how often adults deliver food to their chicks. We’re also continuing to collect bill load photos of their prey items for diet analysis.

Working alongside Dr. Rachael Orben, the interns, and other researchers on this project has been amazing. I’ve gained so much knowledge about seabird life history and current research from our conversations and time together in the field and lab. Being able to wake up each morning at sunrise to the salty wind in my hair, the raucous calls of the murres, and the flaring brilliant blue throats of the cormorants has been an incredible way to spend my summer.

I can’t wait to see what the rest of the season brings — stay tuned!

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To the Lighthouse: Another Year of Monitoring Breeding Seabirds at Yaquina Head

By Will Kennerley, Faculty Research Assistant, OSU Seabird Oceanography Lab

The 19th consecutive year of Yaquina Head monitoring is upon us. A local naturalist, Chris Fox, first reported murres occupying Colony Rock in mid-March but the returning murres were met with Bald Eagle disturbances almost immediately. While eagle disturbance likely contributed to the rather sporadic murre attendance throughout April and May, it seems that delays in upwelling (or at least a delay in consistent upwelling?) likely limited seabird breeding activity during the spring. While I’m still waiting for more formal, quantitative summaries of spring ocean conditions here, we observed warmer sea surface temperatures (12°C/54°F) off the central coast during much of May. During this time, we witnessed murres and cormorants attending the colony, but only half-hearted cormorant nest building on May 21st, the date on which we had our first Brandt’s eggs the year before.

Then, during the last week of May, the satellite maps I was monitoring began to show plumes of cool water moving northward from the California line. Sea surface temperatures dropped below 10°C/50°F close to the coast, suggesting the onset of strong upwelling and, presumably, increased ocean productivity. With surprising speed and synchronicity, we noted both of our cormorant species and murres quickly began nest building and/or egg-laying. By the first week of June we had our first Brandt’s Cormorant and Common Murre eggs, and our first Pelagic Cormorant eggs were laid before June 11th.

As May faded into June, colder ocean temperatures (at left, with cold temperatures shown in purples and dark blues) appeared along the central Oregon Coast, suggesting the onset of summer upwelling and increasing ocean productivity. Shortly after, Brandt’s Cormorants (right) began collecting nesting material, constructing nests, and laying eggs.

This level of synchronicity was exciting to see and stands in stark contrast to observations over the last few years. In 2024, Pelagic Cormorant breeding phenology was several weeks behind that of Brandt’s, while in 2023 both cormorant species were closely synced but they were a month or more ahead of the Common Murres! The reasons behind the highly variable breeding phenology are likely a complicated mix of ocean conditions and predation pressure, with the timing of murre egg laying regularly more aligned with Brandt’s Cormorants at our less eagle-disturbed site in Depoe Bay. This year, however, murres even at Yaquina Head seem to be laying eggs in sync with both cormorant species, and are doing so at dates closer to (though still later than) historical norms.

Now that we’re into the middle of June, most seabirds at our sites are busily incubating full clutches. Eagle disturbances continue but so far appear to be comparatively mild, with fewer whole colony-clearing disturbances observed. Still, eagles have regularly swept murres from the south end of Colony Rock and Flat Top, and we’ve rarely observed eggs at these exposed sites persist more than a few days. Elsewhere, such as our Lower Colony Rock and Whale Rock subcolonies, which offer more protection against aerial predators, some murres have been incubating for over a week already; this means that we could have murre chicks by July 10th, if all goes well! The first Western Gull chicks, meanwhile, have already begun to hatch, and visitors should keep an eye out for fuzzy, speckled heads poking up from the stones and sparse grasses atop Colony Rock.

Common Murres began to lay their speckled, blue-green eggs at both Yaquina Head and Pirate Cove/Depoe Bay during early and mid June this year.

Our lab also just welcomed a new set of interns and research assistants for the summer – Caitlin (NSF-REU), Cherish (OSU undergraduate), and David (EFTA intern at BLM’s Yaquina Head Outstanding Natural Area). It’s always convenient when the bird’s breeding phenology aligns well with OSU’s quarter system, and I’m hopeful our full team will get to observe the complete egg to fledgling progression! Although it’s early days, the strong, synchronized reproductive effort, relatively mild eagle disturbances, and regular appearance of rockfishes and large sandlance in murre bills (as display fish), all give me hope that our breeding seabirds have a successful season ahead of them.

More to come!

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“Professional Puffin Paparazzi”: Photographing Tufted Puffins at Haystack Rock

By Eliza Wesemann, Summer 2024 Tufted Puffin Bill Load Photography Technician

Pacific Herring, sardine, larval fish, salmon, smelt, squid, and lamprey. What do these ocean creatures have in common? They were all on the Tufted Puffin’s menu this summer, and this season the puffins ate like kings. My name is Eliza Wesemann, and this summer I worked for OSU’s Seabird Oceanography Lab as a Tufted Puffin Bill Load Photographer at Oregon’s iconic Haystack Rock in Cannon Beach.

Eliza Wesemann, summer technician for the Seabird Oceanography Lab, photographs Tufted Puffins at Haystack Rock in Cannon Beach, Oregon

A little bit about me – I am a senior studying wildlife ecology and management at Utah State University. I am originally from Brookline, Massachusetts, and am pursuing a career focused on wildlife conservation and research. Over the years I have aided research projects on a variety of different species including Pinyon Jays, Greater Sage-Grouse, Mountain Goats, and American Pika, but Tufted Puffins hold a special place in my heart for their outrageously cute appearance and mannerisms.

Tufted Puffins are little black football-shaped birds with two long white/yellow eyebrow tufts, and a bright orange beak and webbed feet – in other words, a very silly looking bird! The Tufted Puffin population is thriving further north in Alaska, but they are struggling in the southern part of their range, from southern British Columbia to Northern California. Historically, Haystack Rock supported the second largest Tufted Puffin breeding colony in Oregon, with an estimate of 400 breeding birds in 1978. However, recent work by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report, the Haystack Rock population has dropped to just 102 breeding birds in 20241.

The decline of Tufted Puffins at Haystack Rock over 1978 to 2024
(data from Naughton et al. 2007 and USFWS, unpublished)

Reflecting this decline, Tufted Puffins are listed as ‘Endangered’ in Washington state, ‘Sensitive’ in Oregon, and a ‘Species of Special Concern’ in California. Efforts to list the bird as federally Threatened or Endangered under the Endangered Species Act have unfortunately fallen short, as the Species Status Assessment came to the conclusion that the listing is “not warranted” despite the decline of coastal colonies throughout the southern range2.

Haystack Rock is 236 feet tall, with steep grassy slopes home to all sorts of species of seabird nesting and rearing young. Beyond Tufted Puffins, Pigeon Guillemots, Black Oystercatchers, Western Gulls, Brandt’s and Pelagic Cormorants, Common Murres, and Rhinoceros Auklets all call Haystack their home during the summer months. While most seabirds nest on the open slope, Tufted Puffins have earthen burrows hidden among the grass, making it difficult to keep track of active burrows and breeding pairs. In the recent Oregon Fish and Wildlife Monitoring Study, they found an estimated 51 occupied burrows with 102 breeding birds.

A Tufted Puffin returns to its burrow on Haystack Rock’s grassy slopes among nesting Common Murres

My goal was essentially to document the diet of Tufted Puffins by taking pictures (using a Sony A9 camera with 200-600mm lens) anytime I spotted a puffin with fish. I did the same for murres and pigeon guillemots with bill loads as well when the opportunity arose. Although the Tufted Puffins were generally the most active from sunrise to noon, their feeding schedules and Haystack appearances were elusive and inconsistent, often hard to predict. The puffins could be active and visible on the rock or in air flying laps, but not feeding; or completely hidden away in their burrows only leaving to collect fish, depending on the day. I made sure to be stationed at Haystack every morning to make sure to catch the puffins on their good eating days, as they were unpredictable.

My day-to-day schedule would be to wake up an hour before sunrise, prepare the camera and make my way down to the rock just as it was bright enough to shoot images. I would adjust the settings to the conditions of the day, stand as close as I could get to the rock given the tide, stare at the horizon, and wait until a puffin flew in towards the rock. In the time it took to spot a puffin, haul up my camera and zero in on the bird, they had often already disappeared into their burrows! Otherwise, they might fly an absurdly long lap around the rock, seemingly displaying their fish proudly! It was usually hard to tell if they had fish in their beak until after I had already taken the picture, so I would end the day sorting through hundreds of images of puffins in flight with only a small portion carrying bill loads of fish.

One of the more difficult skills I learned over the summer was distinguishing puffins approaching distantly from the sea from the other seabirds, which was even harder if the weather was overcast. Without the sun to illuminate the tell-tale white belly of the murre, the red feet of the Pigeon Guillemot and the orange glint of the puffin’s beak, the sky becomes a whirling mass of unidentifiable black flapping specks. In those moments, I would rely on the fact that puffins are slightly larger and darker against a gray sky, and hope for the best.

One of the most exciting highlights of the season was the feeding frenzy on July 23rd, where I captured a whopping 131 individual puffin bill loads on the camera. It was a very rare moment where the three variables of good puffin photos overlapped; low tide, partly cloudy but not overcast, and high puffin activity. I couldn’t put the camera down; the sky was filled with puffins with fish. Most puffins were bringing in multiple large smelt at a time, suggesting these fishes were just offshore, perhaps in a spawning aggregation. A few puffins were visibly rounder after that day – they evidently ate like kings!

A Tufted Puffin with a bill filled with smelt flies back to feed its chick during the July 23rd feeding frenzy

At Haystack, I had the opportunity to network with other wildlife photographers about “Birds with Fish”, a citizen science project exploring the diets of Oregon coastal birds using community-sourced, non-invasive photography. One of the highlights while working at Cannon Beach was engaging in side conversations with fellow photographers about puffins, conservation, and life in general. Helping visitors tourists identify puffins from Murres, introducing the ‘Birds with Fish’ initiative, and general wildlife public education were other valuable aspects of the position that I looked forward to during fieldwork.

Another highlight of the season was assisting Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife biologists with their burrow counts of the puffins on Cannon Beach. Together, we tag-teamed the process: I pointed out puffins and tracked them into their burrows, then marked on a map the area of the rock the puffins flew into. It was exciting to be able to contribute the skills I learned over the season for research to uncover more about the Tufted Puffins at Haystack Rock.

Puffins have always held a special place in my heart, as I initially became passionate about wildlife conservation from photographing Atlantic Puffins during a trip in Iceland five years ago. So, this position was a perfect culmination of my interests–wildlife research and photography–an incredibly valuable ecological research experience, and all while experiencing the beautiful Oregon coast.

I would like to thank Dr. Rachael Orben and Will Kennerley at OSU’s Seabird Oceanography Lab for the amazing opportunity, as well as Friends of Haystack Rock and Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife for the support at Haystack Rock. This was a dream job and an experience I’ll never forget.

Acknowledgments: The Oregon Wildlife Foundation provided funding to support field work in 2024. The Friends of Haystack Rock supported this project by providing housing in Cannon Beach. Thank you!

  1. Stephensen, S.W. 2024. Tufted Puffin monitoring study at Haystack Rock, Cannon Beach, Oregon 2010-2024. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Unpublished Report, Oregon Coast National Wildlife Refuge Complex, Newport, Oregon 97365. 35 pp. ↩︎
  2. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service). 2020. Species Status Assessment Report for the Tufted Puffin (Fratercula cirrhata), Version 1.0. Anchorage Fish and Wildlife Office, Anchorage, Alaska. ↩︎

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To Fledge or Not to Fledge: Yaquina Head End of Season Update, Summer 2024

By Hannah Motta, Environment for the Americas Intern at Yaquina Head Outstanding Natural Area

Although it’s not the typical rainy season that signals the end of summer here, we officially wrapped up our Yaquina Head field season on the morning of August 16th. My name is Hannah, and I’m an Education and Outreach Intern with Environment for the Americas, stationed at Yaquina Head. I recently graduated from the University of Oregon with a B.S. in Environmental Science and a B.A. in Spanish, where I focused on environmental education. My goal has always been to inspire people to care about nature through birds, which ultimately brought me here to Yaquina Head.

Figure 1. Environment for the Americas Intern Hannah Motta at Cobble Beach at Yaquina Head Outstanding Natural Area during low tide.

In my current role, I work as an interpretive park ranger and assist our facilities operations manager on the maintenance team at Yaquina Head Outstanding Natural Area. Throughout the summer I assisted Oregon State’s Seabird Oceanography Lab in monitoring cormorant, gull, and murre colonies at Yaquina Head and Depoe Bay.

As we predicted in our earlier posts from this spring, this year was a “bust” for Pelagic Cormorants, while Brandt’s Cormorants had a much more positive outcome. The Common Murres, however, experienced dramatically different results between Yaquina Head and Depoe Bay, largely due to high rates of Bald Eagle predation. As you may have noticed throughout this season, Bald Eagles have taken center stage as some of the main characters.

Since most people prefer to get the bad news out of the way first, let’s start with what happened—or more accurately, what didn’t happen—with the Murres at Yaquina Head. Frequent eagle disturbances caused the Murres to flush for hours at a time, leaving very few eggs laid in visible areas. Of the nests we were able to observe, we followed 38 across three different plots. Out of those 38 nests, only two eggs successfully hatched and fledged. A few Murre chicks may have taken shelter in the nooks and crannies of Whale Rock to avoid predation, but overall, we were left with a mere 5% reproductive success rate—a somber finale for the Murres at Yaquina Head.

Now for the much happier news from Depoe Bay! With far fewer eagle disturbances, the Murres had a much better outcome. We monitored 75 Murre nests across five plots, and an impressive 93% of all chicks survived to fledge! Throughout the year, we documented adults bringing back lots of smelts, flatfishes, and sandlance to their chicks, likely fueling the high fledging success rates we witnessed.

Figure 2. Common Murre chick in Depoe Bay with a Brandt’s Cormorant behind.

And yes, as I mentioned earlier, the eagles were causing quite a bit of drama this year. They even managed to prey on some adult cormorants and chicks, which we don’t typically observe. Back at Yaquina Head, we tracked the progress of 27 Pelagic Cormorant nests and 45 Brandt’s Cormorant nests.

The Pelagic Cormorants nested nearly two weeks later than usual at Yaquina Head (long-term average hatch date: July 11th; 2024 median hatch date: July 28th) later than usual and had low reproductive success. Only 15 of the 27 nest structures visible at Yaquina Head had eggs, and these had an average clutch size of 2.7 eggs per nest. Sadly, only 12% of those eggs hatched in late July, and only two nests managed to fledge chicks.

Figure 3. Pelagic Cormorant nesting on cliffside.

But here’s the good news! The Brandt’s Cormorants had a much more successful season. Out of 45 nests monitored, eggs were laid in 37, with the average clutch size being a very respectable 3.1 eggs per nest. On average, each nest fledged 2.1 chicks, which is well above the long-term average, though slightly lower than last year’s record-breaking 2.4 chicks per nest.

Interestingly, despite variable eagle predation between our two sites (typically high at Yaquina Head, low at Depoe Bay) our cormorants did very similarly at both colonies. Although we observed a few instances of eagles preying on cormorant chicks at both sites, it appears the impact this predation had on cormorant nesting success was either minimal, or more even between sites than disturbance to murres was. We’ll have to watch out next year to see if eagles continue to prey on cormorant chicks and these birds will face any population-level impacts like cormorants in British Columbia have in recent decades (Carter et al. 2018).

Figure 4. Brandt’s Cormorant and Common Murre at Depoe Bay through the spotting scope.

The 2024 seabird monitoring season at Yaquina Head was a mixed bag; while we observed poor reproductive performance for both Pelagic Cormorants and Common Murres, the Brandt’s Cormorants had a great season. What’s more, the Depoe Bay Murres thrived, seemingly unaware of the struggle their conspecifics faced just ~15km south! But now, both colonies appear starkly quiet and empty; it’s time to start looking forward to the day the rocks and cliffs are covered by breeding seabirds once more.

I’d like to thank you all for your support of the Yaquina Head Seabird Monitoring Program and want to extend a huge thanks to the amazing team I had the opportunity to work with—Aya, Travolis, and Will. You all made getting up extremely early and standing in the cold by far some of my favorite memories this summer.

Thanks for keeping up, and see you all next year!

Figure 5. Awesome Yaquina Head Seabird Monitoring team. Pictured from left to right: Aya, Travolis, Will and Hannah.

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Notes from the field: Seabird Predators on Oregon’s South Coast

By Travolis Williams, Oregon State University undergraduate

Was sup everyone,

My name is Travolis Williams. I am a Junior currently at Oregon State University. I am originally from St. Louis, Missouri. I came to Oregon to pursue a degree in marine biology and found this once in a lifetime opportunity with VIEW fellowship this past February. I intern with the Seabird Oceanography Lab at the Hatfield Marine Science Center.                    

Seabird Oceanography Lab intern Travolis Williams (right) helps field assistant Colton Veltkamp collect river otter scat samples.

I currently work on two projects within the department. One being monitoring seabirds along the coast at Yaquina head and Depoe Bay surveying the two colonies with Common Murres, Pelagic Cormorants, Brandt’s Cormorants, and the Western Gull (Field work). The data gathered in this project is extremely specific and has been tracked for an extended amount of time making it equally as important as it is relevant and up to date. I have had the wonderful opportunity to work under Rachael Orben, William Kennerley, and his additional intern, Aya Attal to observe the unique behaviors and aspects of each of these species of enticing birds.

The second project is processing fecal matter from otter communities along rivers and estuaries in southern Oregon. The scat, as we call it, is collected so the scat’s compenets can be identified via microscope in order to assess river otter diet. River otters are generalist predators that sometimes feed not just on fish and invertebrates, but also on breeding seabirds. We collect these scat samples because Luke, the cool graduate student whose project it is, surveys the dynamic of otter predation on Leach’s Storm-petrels. Storm-petrels are a very ecologically important species because they play a vital role in being an indicator of the current environmental conditions that they are accustomed to. Furthermore, they are needed to maintain the ecosystems they are a part of.

Recently, I had a chance to go to the Port Orford Field Station, a research facility staffed by OSU (Oregon State University) and USDA, and it was and wonderful experience. I was only there for three days total but had so much fun. As far as work goes, we went kayaking down the Chetco River where I could do fieldwork with Luke S., the graduate student, collecting otter scat along the river’s banks. I learned that otters defecate on rocks called latrines and are also used for socializing and scent marking. It was also my first-time kayaking which was incredibly fun for me.

The next day we did in-land work to give us a break from the water and ran into an amazing group of otters in the water and while collecting scat me, Luke, and his assistant Colton ran into a wild otter that was no more than 6 feet from us before it calmly turned around. The final day we went kayaking down Coos Bay river where we did not find much otter scat, but I did learn that raccoons and otter most likely have some sort of relationship with one another because we found that raccoons and otters use the same latrines. I also learned that waves are not anything to be taken lightly because being on a wave crest a foot off the surface of the water is not all too fun when you are an amateur kayaker.

The field team (clockwise from bottom: Travolis Williams, Colton Veltkamp, and M.S. student Luke Stuntz) on the coast near Gold Beach, Oregon. Offshore is Hunter’s Island, one of the largest Leach’s Storm-Petrel colonies in the region, where predators like river otters have been recently recorded.

Overall, the trip was amazing, and the trip was one of a kind. Even the staff in the facility were wonderful. We had a chance to go free diving and even went everyone was all in from work before bed we would watch a movie that everyone would enjoy.

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Yaquina Head Mid Season Update, Summer 2024

By Aya Attal, NSF REU Intern, Portland State University

While spring is usually the season of change for most things, there’s been a lot of change over on the Oregon Coast this summer, too! A lot of change for me, certainly– my name is Aya Attal, and I go to school at Portland State University. However, I’ve been living in Newport this summer and working as an REU intern in Rachael Orben’s lab at Oregon State University, studying seabirds at Yaquina Head and Depoe Bay. And while there is a lot of change for me, there is even more change for the seabirds this summer; we’ve noticed a lot of improvement in the outlook of the breeding activities in the murres, cormorants, and gulls at Yaquina Head (Newport) and Pirate Cove (Depoe Bay). 

A lot has happened over a few short weeks at Yaquina Head (Figure 1) this summer, even since the last update on June 11th.

Figure 1. Yaquina Head at 6am. Whale Rock can be seen at the bottom. The lone (?) murre chick at Yaquina Head is located in a protected crevice low on the rock.

While there are adult murres regularly present on three of the rocks at Yaquina Head, eagle disturbances have kept many of the adults from comfortably being able to incubate eggs. A juvenile and adult bald eagle regularly fly down towards the rocks, causing murres to “abandon ship”. This leaves many eggs vulnerable to predators. This behavior from the murres is called flushing, and is characterized by the murres flying off the rocks to raft in the water in droves in order to escape predators. Unfortunately, this leaves their eggs open to predation by the opportunistic gulls!

In recent years, we’ve noticed that eagle disturbance decreases as the summer goes on, and eagles have been observed only infrequently since the start of July. A small spree of murre egg-laying followed in early July yet these eggs were all lost within a few weeks to predators. Although murres are attending the colony more often now, we have not had new eggs in our plots since July 18th. Although at least one murre chick has hatched in an obscure crack at the base of Whale Rock – well sheltered from aerial predators – eggs elsewhere at Yaquina Head have all been predated. However, the continued presence of murres at the colony suggests that the possibility of breeding cannot yet be ruled out (Figure 2).

While there may not be any chicks in our Yaquina Head plots, murre chicks have been sighted at Depoe Bay since July 9th. This is good news! The chicks have survived at high rates and we expect the first of them to fledge by the end of the month. We have also started our diet observations for murre chick diets and have since observed smelts, flatfishes, and sand lance being delivered to chicks at Depoe Bay.

Figure 2. Some of the murres in this image from Yaquina Head are exhibiting behavior that corresponds to sitting on top of an egg. Leaning forward with their wings cocked out a little, murres spend a lot of time on top of their eggs, due to the fact that they have no nests whatsoever. 

Earlier in the season, we thought that Pelagic Cormorants wouldn’t be breeding this year, and only a single active Pelagic cormorant nest was observed at the start of June. However, a small group of them have begun nesting at Yaquina Head’s Whale Rock since July 3rd, with the number of nests increasing since then. We are now following 15 Pelagic Cormorant nests at Yaquina Head and 20 nests at Depoe Bay, where nesting was also initiated extremely late. The lone nest from June now has two, three week old chicks and the numerous late nests ought to be hatching soon.

While murres and Pelagic Cormorants may have been initially having a little trouble, many of the Brandt’s Cormorants have been very productive over the last few weeks. Brandt’s Cormorants chicks began hatching June 16th (Yaquina Head) and July 2nd (Depoe Bay). The earliest chicks are already starting to get too large to fit in their nests, with some chicks at Yaquina Head considered to be fully fledged (> 25 days of age). It looks like it will be another successful year for Brandt’s Cormorants on the central Oregon Coast.

Western Gulls are also doing well at both Yaquina Head and Depoe Bay, with many of the chicks already becoming much too active to keep a close eye on. The chicks have been getting very adventurous (Figure 3), with some getting a bit too mobile to continue monitoring. We followed 23 gull nests in total at Depoe Bay, 52% of which succeeded in hatching chicks. We followed 9 gull nests at Yaquina Head, where 67% of them hatched chicks.

Figure 3. Western Gull chicks at Depoe Bay, spotted to be camouflaged with the rock surrounding them! 

As for other seabirds, there’ve been a few Black Oystercatchers at both sites, and while their nests aren’t visible this year, I’ve been seeing them poke their heads out every now and again, especially around Depoe Bay. There have also been Caspian Terns seen flying overhead at Yaquina Bay. Both the terns and oystercatchers will be heard before they are seen in most cases, so make sure to keep an ear out for their calls.

Finally, in other very exciting news, we’ve also spotted a few Tufted Puffins flying around Yaquina Head (Figure 4)! Our last sighting was July 8th– which, coincidentally, is around the same time as the last sighting of tufted puffins at Yaquina Head last year, with 2023’s last tufted puffin sighting being July 9th. Their presence at Yaquina Head doesn’t necessarily mean they’re nesting there this year, though, as the puffins have not been seen bringing food back to nests at any of the surrounding rocks. But it’s still exciting to see them around the area.

Figure 4. Tufted puffin in flight. There are no signs that tufted puffins are breeding at Yaquina Head this year, even if they have been sighted there repeatedly.

Overall, while things may have seemed rather worrisome at the beginning of the season, there is some hope now that there will be Pelagic Cormorant chicks and (perhaps) a few murre chicks at Yaquina Head. The situation appears to be rosier at Depoe Bay, with an abundance of murre, cormorant, and gull chicks at that colony. Overall – between our breeding seabirds and visiting Caspian Terns and Tufted Puffins – it’s shaping up to be a pretty eventful season for seabirds along the Oregon Coast at Yaquina Head and Depoe Bay.

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To Breed or Not to Breed

Yaquina Head Early Season Update, Summer 2024

It’s the start of another summer on the Oregon Coast and I once again find myself spending most mornings out on rocky headlands for another season of seabird monitoring. Since early May, I’ve been following the breeding activities of murres, cormorants, and gulls at Yaquina Head (Newport) and Pirate Cove (Depoe Bay). As the season begins to take shape, I wanted to share what I’ve been seeing through my spotting scope.

Initial signs are mixed, but seemingly point to a year of low to moderate breeding success for most species. Common Murres have been around the two colonies for months by now, yet occupation of nesting sites has so far only been sporadic. I’ve yet again been observing frequent disturbances by up to four bald eagles at a time, which has prevented the murres from regularly settling into the colony and their nest sites (Figure 1). Because of the frequent eagle activity, I’ve rarely had the opportunity to see murres fully occupy all the Yaquina Head subcolonies; my best guess, however, is that the number of murres attending the colony is lower than at this time last year.

Despite regular disturbances, I observed the first few murre eggs at Yaquina Head on June 6th! While these eggs were predated within a few days, this does indicate that murres are willing to attempt breeding and I suspect more eggs will be seen soon. The ability of murres to breed successfully last year, despite heavy eagle disturbance early on, gives me reason to be cautiously hopeful that at least some Yaquina Head murres will manage to fledge chicks this year. Eagle disturbances appears to be fewer and less severe at Pirate Cove, and I’m eager to see how long the first few murre eggs at that colony persist. Despite the challenges imposed by eagles, murres appear motivated to attempt breeding.

Figure 1. One of several subadult Bald Eagles frequently seen disturbing the seabirds breeding at Yaquina Head, Oregon.

In contrast, Pelagic Cormorants are by and large not attending either the Yaquina Head or Pirate Cove colonies this year. Last summer saw record-high Pelagic Cormorant productivity and each monitored nest fledged an average of 2.8 chicks; however, so far this summer, I’ve only been able to locate a single nest with eggs across our two sites.

Cormorants, generally – and Pelagics, in particular – are known for highly variable reproductive outputs (Figure 2). Some seabirds (e.g., tubenoses) take more of a “low and slow” approach to reproduction that leads to a moderate but fairly consistent output across years, but Pelagic Cormorant reproduction is typified by highly variable, “boom or bust” cycles. Ainley and Boekelheide note in their Seabirds of the Farallon Islands (1990) that Pelagic Cormorants experience the most extreme interannual variation in breeding effort and success of all the seabird species that breed there. Cormorants are sensitive to fluctuations in prey populations and may skip breeding when prey is scarce, but they can also lay large clutches to take advantage of highly favorable conditions.

While 2023 was undoubtedly a “boom” year, 2024 is shaping up to be the accompanying “bust”. Initial monitoring of many well-built nests saw birds abandon nest-guarding early on and relatively few Pelagic Cormorants even appear to be attending the colony. Cormorant reproduction in the California Current System is related to sea surface temperature, with low reproductive effort often associated with warm-water, El Niño periods (Schmidt et al. 2015) like we experienced this last winter.

Figure 2. Pelagic Cormorant productivity at Yaquina Head from 2008-2023. Reproductive output from this species is highly variable between years.

Brandt’s Cormorants (Figure 3), on the other hand, are attempting to breed this year at both sites. Most are busily incubating three or even four egg clutches now, with the first chicks expected by the end of June. It’s possible that Brandt’s Cormorants finished the winter in better body condition than Pelagics, perhaps because they often exploit different foraging habitats and prey types (Ainley et al. 1981). Brandt’s Cormorant reproduction does tend to be somewhat less variable than that of their cliff-dwelling relatives (Ainley & Boekelheide 1990), but still varies considerably between years in relation to ocean conditions and prey abundance (Schmidt et al. 2015; Ainley et al. 2018). It’s interesting to observe these two congeneric species of seabird respond so differently to these conditions. However, cormorants may also abandon breeding efforts mid-season if prey availability should suddenly decline, so I’ll continue monitoring to see how the Brandt’s manage to do this summer.

Figure 3. Brandt’s Cormorant males spend lots of time collecting nesting material. Breeding Brandt’s were frequently seen collecting grasses from the headland at Yaquina Head, as well as stealing material from their neighbors’ nests.

As for other species, Western Gulls have been faithfully incubating their two and three egg clutches at both sites for several weeks now – it’s just a matter of time before our first downy chicks of the year are around. The Black Oystercatchers aren’t nesting at easily-visible sites this year, but their raucous calls continue to be a near-constant presence at both colonies. Excitingly, I’ve also observed Tufted Puffins circling the Yaquina Head murre colony on several occasions, and once saw one flying over Pirate Cove! While neither site has much suitable nesting habitat for puffins, the USFWS recently placed puffin decoys and artificial burrows on Gull Rock (located squarely between the Yaquina Head and Pirate Cove colonies) to draw them there. The puffins’ continued interest in these sites continues to raise my hopes that one day soon we’ll have Tufted Puffins nesting again on the Central Coast. 

So far, it seems challenging to predict just what kind of year we’ll see on the Oregon Coast. Reduced breeding effort by Pelagic Cormorants and (to a lesser extent) murres, suggests unfavorable conditions. Yet, murres (though perhaps in somewhat lesser numbers) have begun to lay eggs at both sites and Brandt’s are attempting to breed in seemingly typical numbers. I’ll continue to brave the wind and fog to document how this annual drama plays out.

References

Ainley & Boekelheide. 1990. Seabirds of the Farallon Islands: Ecology, Structure, and Dynamics of an Upwelling System Community. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, USA.

Ainley et al. 1981. Feeding ecology of marine cormorants in southwestern North America. The Condor 83: 130-131. https://doi.org/10.2307/1367418

Ainley et al. 2018. Ecosystem-based management affecting Brandt’s Cormorant resources and populations in the central California Current region. Biological Conservation 217: 407-418. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2017.11.021

Schmidt et al. 2015. Shifting effects of ocean conditions on survival and breeding probability of a long-lived seabird. PloS ONE 10(7): e0132372. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0132372