Officials at Pacific Wildlife Care, which cares for injured, oiled or emaciated birds, say they’ve recently been treating more seabirds.<\/p>\n
\u201cRight now we are dealing with an influx of common murres and this is a very unusual influx,\u201d said Kelley Boland, Pacific Wildlife Care Development Coordinator. <\/p>\n
Common murres are seabirds that spend most of their life out on the water. Boland said Pacific Wildlife Care has taken in more than 200 common murres since Sept. 1, with most arriving within the last 10 days.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had a record 26 common murres admitted in one day, which is a record for common murre admissions for our clinic in our clinic’s history,\u201d Boland said. <\/p>\n
Boland says many of the birds arrive weak and malnourished, suggesting a starvation event likely caused by changing water temperatures along the coast.<\/p>\n
\u201cWarm water will drive prey fish that generally like cooler water deeper into the colder water and out of reach for these seabirds that hunt fish,\u201d Boland said. <\/p>\n
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife said that the bulk of these reports have been in San Luis Obispo, Monterey, Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties.<\/p>\n
In a statement, Fish and Wildlife said the agency\u2019s wildlife health lab is receiving its first batch of birds this week for postmortem examinations, and findings on the possible causes of death are not yet available. Officials are also asking the public not to touch or handle dead, sick, or injured seabirds, and instead report them to a local wildlife rehabilitation facility.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe start by making sure that they\u2019re stable, so by taking their temperature,” said Sophie Swan, Pacific Wildlife Care Rehabilitation Technician. “A lot of them arrive very cold. It\u2019s been a very long, painful journey coming from offshore to the beach.\u201d<\/p>\n
After the birds are warmed up, staff will perform tests such as blood work and swabs to evaluate their health.<\/p>\n
The birds will first be monitored and fed inside before being moved outside ahead of their release back into the wild.<\/p>\n
Swan said many of the birds have been found tangled around kelp on the beach.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you happen to be walking the beach and you walk past a big pile of kelp, if you wouldn\u2019t mind just checking to see that there\u2019s no birds that kind of look like a penguin, that would be great. If you do see one that\u2019s alive, they definitely need to be brought in. They won\u2019t survive on land,” Swan said. <\/p>\n
Pacific Wildlife Care has a hotline you can call to report birds at (805) 543-9453.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Officials at Pacific Wildlife Care, which cares for injured, oiled or emaciated birds, say they’ve recently been treating…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":857640,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[79,201],"class_list":["post-857639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=857639"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857639\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/857640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=857639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=857639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=857639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}