Birds with Fish is a community science initiative exploring the diets of coastal Oregon birds through non-invasive, community-sourced photography. While we’re based in the Seabird Oceanography Lab at Oregon State University, the real heart and soul of Birds with Fish is its contributors. Local birders and nature photographers across Oregon are encourage to share with us whatever photos they might have of marine or estuarine birds with prey. By recruiting help from the nature-loving public, we’re able to get data on bird diets from a much broader set of species, locations, and times than we could ever hope to do alone! Photographs of any kind of coastal bird (murres, loons, cormorants, herons, gulls, and so on!) with prey in a marine or estuarine environment (the ocean, a bay, a river mouth) can be useful to our work. Your submissions to Birds with Fish will help us not only identify what fish (and invertebrates) Oregon’s coastal birds are feeding on, but these data will help us decipher why diet varies over space and time and how we can best protect the prey resources Oregon’s birds need to thrive.
You can help researchers at Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center study seabird diet by submitting your photos and contributing to our research efforts. Seabirds are excellent indicators of marine health and by studying their diets we can better our understanding of local ocean conditions. Since the environment is always changing, so are the food sources available to seabirds! We want to continuously monitor seabird diets to understand how these animals are adapting to a changing climate and what threats they may currently face.
Forage fish, coastal birds and how it all interacts
The coastal waters of Oregon are part of what is known as the California Current Large Marine Ecosystem which runs from Baja California, Mexico to the central coast of British Columbia. Along this stretch of the Pacific coastline there has been historically significant distribution of what are known as ‘forage fish’. These forage fish are relatively small and often live in the upper layers of the open water which makes them prime prey for other fish, marine mammals and birds. Species like pacific herring, smelts, sandlance, pacific sardine, northern anchovy are all considered forage fish.
Photo thanks to Sarah Schoen, USGS
In Oregon, forage fish play a significant role in both the balance of the natural system and in the balance of Oregon’s nearly $700-million commercial fishing industry. While there is little direct fishing for forage fishes in Oregon, commercially-important species like salmon, tuna, and sablefish heavily rely on these forage fishes for food at different parts of their lives. Because of their outsized role in the ecosystem, in 2016 the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and Pacific Fisheries Management Council drafted protections specific to Oregon’s coastal waters to protect the integrity of remaining forage fish stocks. Unfortunately, forage fish can be challenging and expensive to sample on the ocean, and so their population trends remain relatively poorly understood.
So what does this have to do with Birds with Fish?
Oregon’s coastal birds rely heavily on fish and marine invertebrates to sustain themselves and their chicks during breeding season. For imperiled species of interest like the Tufted Puffin, the presence and abundance of calorically-rich forage fish species is vital to their reproductive success. Birds with Fish attempts to quantify the diets of Oregon’s seabirds by identifying forage fish (and other invertebrates) from photographs. Through this data, we hope to determine which forage fishes are most important for Oregon’s seabird populations.
Tufted puffins are an iconic Oregon coast seabird
But their future is uncertain after a nearly 95% population collapse from the 1980’s to 2010. In the span of a few decades tufted puffins population numbers fell from ~5,000 to ~400 throughout Oregon. This population decline sparked concern from both the conservation community and the Fish and Wildlife Service. However in 2020, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided not to list Tufted Puffins under the Endangered Species Act since the puffin population in parts of Alaska is still large and thriving.
Despite this decision, Tufted Puffins in California, Oregon, and Washington have declined precipitously in recent decades; worst of all, we still lack a firm understanding of why this is happened! Scientists from many agencies and universities are looking into possible reasons. One idea supposes that increasing erosion and habitat loss on their breeding islands could be hurting Tufted Puffin breeding success; others think that bycatch in gillnets during the 1980s (in which thousands of puffins were caught in nets and drowned) has pushed the population so low that they still can’t recover. Perhaps the most popular theory is that changing food resources could be to blame but very little data exists to examine this theory. In fact, the only data we had on what Oregon Tufted Puffins were eating was almost 40 years old (Boone 1985)! It became clear that we needed to spend more time studying this fundamental part of the biologies of Tufted Puffins and Oregon’s other coastal birds.
Now, thanks to monitoring efforts by Oregon State University researchers and Birds with Fish contributors, we began collecting data on Tufted Puffin diets in 2022 and building up our data set to investigate changes in puffin diet. With continued support and contributions, we can hopefully learn about what resources puffins need so that we can take the best, most effective actions possible to save the remaining Tufted Puffins in Oregon.
