The sight of a white pick-up truck parked along Devil's Slide for the past six months has become as common as the morning fog.
Researchers in the vehicle, armed with high-powered spotting scopes and binoculars, have been observing the fruits of their labors. The group is attempting to restore a colony of common murres to a blunt rock island in the ocean below. But since the Review first reported on the project in January, it has soared above early expectations.
What started out as a rock covered with wooden and plastic birds is now home to a fledgling number of the real things. Using a controversial technique known as "social attraction," biologists with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have lured a number of the sea birds back to the rock that once served as home to thousands of the black and white birds. Especially exciting to the biologists are three newly hatched chicks.
Due to an oil spill off the coast in 1986, an estimated 9,000 sea birds were killed, 6,000 of them murres. Gill netting, which is now illegal, also contributed to the colony's decimation. Murres were last spotted on the guano-topped Devil's Slide Rock, which is just south of the eponymously named stretch of Highway 1, in 1987. But by employing a number of decoys, as well as solar-powered recordings of nesting murres, as many as 29 birds have been spotted on the rock since the project began in January.
"It's going well," said Mike Parker, the Fish and Wildlife biologist in charge of the project. "We had six nests this year, which is just incredible."
Three eggs rolled away from their nests and could not be recovered by their parents, and one is believed to have been smashed. But three eggs hatched in late June and early July. One young murre was born on Independence Day. One of the hatchlings has left the nest for the ocean waters below the rock, where it will likely stick close to its father, which will teach it the finer point of swimming and fishing. A breeding pair generally lays one egg.
When the project began, Parker hoped to attract young, non-breeding birds to the rock to encourage them to return in the future to breed. While many of these birds have made a home on the rock, Parker was thrilled to see older, breeding-age birds also adopt the rock. He speculated that the newly established breeders could have chosen Devil's Slide Rock because it offered a more favorable nesting ground than their old sites.
The number of murres spotted on the rock typically ranges from 14 to 18. But in the past few weeks the number has climbed to as many as 29, said Parker, who with a four-person crew is also observing colonies of murres in Point Reyes and Big Sur.
The early success of the project, which Parker hopes to continue until a full breeding colony is established, may prove to be a model for other bird restoration projects.
In addition to the decoys and recordings, the rock is also equipped with a number of mirrors in which birds can see their reflection, perhaps adding to the birds' impression that the rock is populated with more murres.
Funding for the project comes from a portion of the $6.4 million given to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, state Department of Fish and Game and the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary by the oil tanker company responsible for the spill. Approximately $5 million of the money is for the murre project.
In addition to the murre nests, there are a number of commorant and western sea gull nests on the rock.