In a former life as grad student studying seabirds in the Channel Islands I saw a lot of dead birds. In 1980 we lost virtually 95% of the Western Gull chicks due to a very hot day when the wind layed down and literally cooked them on the spot.
That summer I bemoaned to one of my faculty advisors, John Smiley, that the only constant out there was change and how the hell could we expect to incorporate such change in a Master's or PhD thesis given the short (a year or two) data window.
The recent biologic storm that resulted in thousands of dead birds along the coast of the Pacific Northwest is just a reminder that death happens. A convergence of events can, in an ecological sense, do excatly the same thing to wildlife as a convergence of events that bring down an airliner, sink a ship, cause an auto accident or the loss of a space shuttle. At the end of the day, there is really not a whole lot that we can do about such events, particularly in ecosystems and more so in oceanic ecosystems.
Photo Credit KCBS.
