This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Scrambling through dense salal in the dark, weaving between the majestic western red cedars of northern Haida Gwaii, I could barely imagine where we were just days before—crossing Dixon Entrance off the coast in an open skiff, pushing head-on through ocean swells and salt spray. These were two vastly different worlds, connected by one strange little bird: the marbled murrelet.
My Ph.D. research aims to better understand the connections between the marine and terrestrial environments that marbled murrelets depend on. Working in partnership with the Council of the Haida Nation and Environment and Climate Change Canada, I am combining GPS tracking, diet analysis, environmental DNA and nest searches to better understand where murrelets forage, what they eat and where they nest. This summer, we discovered the first marbled murrelet nest recorded on Haida Gwaii in more than 30 years—the second ever confirmed on the island.
About the size of a robin, the marbled murrelet seems almost ordinary at first glance. Look a little closer, though, and you realize everything about this bird is built to disappear. During the breeding season, its feathers become a rich forest palette of chocolate brown, cinnamon, buff and black—the marbled pattern that gives the species its name.
In winter, that same bird transforms. Its warm brown feathers are replaced with crisp black-and-white plumage, perfectly suited to a life on the open ocean. Bobbing among whitecaps and rolling swells, the bird becomes just another moment of light and shadow on the water.
Unlike almost every other seabird, marbled murrelets don't nest on cliffs or rocky islands. Instead, each spring they leave the ocean behind and fly inland (sometimes more than 80 kilometers, or 50 miles) to ancient forests where they each lay a single egg on broad, moss-covered branches high in the canopy. Their flights are timed for the dim light of dawn and dusk, when they can fly undetected.
To anyone listening in these early hours, the unmistakable sound of their "keer" calls fills the air. Later, they will commute daily from land to sea, bringing foraged fish into the forest to feed their single chick. Over the past century, the loss of old-growth forests across British Columbia has dramatically reduced available nesting habitat.
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