- [Scientist] It was a trail.
[Scientist] Just plow us a path.
(laughing)
- [Narrator] These researchers are looking for a bird,
but not just any bird.
They're looking for the marbled murrelet,
a bird we know so little about.
It's called the enigma of the pacific.
Marbled murrelets nest in the canopy
of the Northwest thick coastal forest,
so trying to find a nest can involve miles
of some of the most miserable bush wacking around.
- [Scientist] Right in the mouth.
- [Scientist] This is insane.
- [Narrator] This is a story about how hard science can be.
- Oh yeah, we didn't go very far at all.
- [Narrator] It's like, take the needle
in the haystack metaphor, but then enlarge the haystack
until it's several miles of dense thorn-filled forests,
and imagine that your needle is a small bird
on a branch 100 feet in the air,
and this isn't even the first step in finding this bird,
so let's start from the beginning.
Kim Nelson is one of the leading experts
on marbled murrelets, and she agreed to meet us
at Cape Perpetua, not far from where
she meet Oregon field guide 25 years ago.
Marbled murrelets spend most of their lives at sea,
but early ornithologists couldn't find them nesting
with other seabirds.
- They've always been a mystery in the 1930s and 40s.
They suspected that murrelets might nest inland,
because they haven't found their nest on the offshore rocks,
but it wasn't until 1974 when a tree climber
was climbing up a tree to cut off a branch in a campground,
and he found a murrelet chick on a nest.
- [Narrator] That was in California.
Kim's team didn't find a nest in Oregon
until 1990.
- Marbled murrelets don't build a nest.
They just lay their egg on a branch,
and so, they need a very large branch.
Generally, they nest in the old growth or mature trees
that have large branches.
- [Narrator] This was all taking place during a battle
known as the timber wars
over whether to log or preserve
the last of the Northwest old growth trees,
so it was a big revelation that murrelets
needed those trees to nest.
- [Narrator] The marbled murrelets dependency on old growth
may one day make the bird as controversial
as the spotted owl, and Kim Nelson's study shows
the murrelet may be further threatened
by clear cutting practices.
- [Narrator] Environmentalists were able
to get marbled murrelets listed as threatened in 1992,
but their numbers have continued to drop,
and it's hard to come up with a plan to save them
when we know so little about the bird.
Enter the Oregon Marbled Murrelet Project.
- Yay!
- [Narrator] It's a team of around 20 scientists
and field crew based out
of Oregon State University's College of Forestry.
- The Oregon Marbled Murrelet Project's core goals
are to determine where the birds are nesting,
how successful they are, and then what are the key sources
of mortality for nests.
- [Narrator] The things they learn about
how different threats, like logging and climate change
effect marbled murrelets could mean the difference
between coming up with a plan to save them,
and the species disappearing without a trace.
Even though they're looking for nests in forests,
this search begins at sea.
They head several miles off shore,
where murrelets tend to forage in rust,
and they go at night so they can sneak up on the birds.
- [Jim] We also have a catcher crew that we contract with.
They come up from California.
- Hook's at the water's edge.
Hook's in the water.
- [Jim] That sounds kinda crazy,
but we put them into a 14 foot inflatable zodiac,
and send them out on the ocean.
- [Narrator] They have a short window
near the start of mating season
to find enough birds to follow for the summer,
but this year, rough ocean conditions
have kept them mostly landlocked.
Now that the sea is calmed enough to go out,
everyone's on edge to salvage the season.
- [Crew Member] Lots of birds out here.
- [Narrator] Then, they see it.
- Usually they'll dive, and then you kinda stop the boat.
Sometimes you'll see them swimming under water,
and you kinda position the boat using hand directions,
telling the driver, "Wade that way,"
and you try to get the boat to the point
where the bird comes up,
and then you just scoop it right out.
- [Narrator] It's an art form.
This team literally travels around the world
working for different murrelet researchers.
Back on the ship, they assess the health of the birds
as they come in.
- [Crew Member] That's a big one.
- [Narrator] Thanks to early research,
we know that the fate of marbled murrelets
depends on preserving the old growth forests they nest in,
but the Marbled Murrelet Project
is learning that the bird's fate is just as tied
to ocean conditions.
- [Crew Member] Hey Jim.
We got a recap from last year.
- [Narrator] In the first year of the project,
none of the birds they captured at sea
went on to breed, and the scientists think one reason
is the many ways climate change
has disrupted the ocean food chain.
- Herring and anchovy have pretty much disappeared
from the oceans, and murrelets are feeding on fish
that are lower quality, and that's likely having an impact
on nesting success.
- [Narrator] They're tracking what the birds eat,
and what effects that has on their health
in reproduction success.
The final step is attaching a small transmitter
that will allow them to track the birds
using what's called radio telemetry.
The tag will eventually fall off on its own.
- Ready? - Yeah.
One, two, three.
(splashing)
- Do you know if there have been lots of birds here?
- There's usually a couple here.
- Yeah.
- [Narrator] Just as the overnight crew
rolls back to the shared houses to crash,
Jason Piasecki and Lindsay Adrean
head out to the beach with an antenna.
- [Lindsay] Every morning, we have technicians
up and down the coast
listening for all of our birds.
They spend most of their time on the water
either foraging or resting.
- It sounds like it's diving.
- Yeah.
- [Narrator] Once a pair of murrelets has laid an egg,
they take turns incubating it,
trading off every morning.
- 439 is back on the water today.
That's possible we may have just missed it.
- [Narrator] The technicians are listening for birds
that go missing every other day.
- We're able to pick up that pattern,
and then that will tell us
that we need to get the plane inland
to look for the nest.
- I think, Brad, today we'll go all the way
up to Cape lookout, and circle around.
- [Narrator] The aerial technician, John Dachenhaus,
flies up and down the coast scanning for beeps.
- [John] So that's a bird.
90 left.
- [Narrator] The birds can nest up to 50 miles
from the sea.
- [John] As much as we can drop in
this drainage over here, Brad.
Let's do it.
What we've noticed is they like to be down in the drainage
in these larger trees that have flyways
for them to come into and from the nest.
Circle left, Brad.
- [Narrator] From this bird's-eye view,
you can see just how much logging
has transformed these forests,
and they're finding that is a problem for the birds.
- [John] One of the big concerns with murrelets
is edge effects, so how close their nests are
to clear cuts or forest edges,
and how much potential nest predators intrude
now that they have access to areas they formally
didn't have access to.
- [Narrator] The project has learned
that red-tailed hawks prey on the nest
in addition to ravens and jays.
If you're wondering why this chick is alone,
it's because the parents are flying back and forth
to bring it fish.
They can make eight trips a day,
burning massive calories and risking predators themselves.
There's little room for error,
so it's easy to see why any changes
to the ocean or the forests can have outsized impacts.
- I think if we hike in towards
that little spot right there, I think it's less dense.
- [Scientist] What is it, this way?
- [Scientist] Yeah.
- [Narrator] Using the general location
obtained from the air, the ground crew moves in.
- Not feeling too good about this one.
- [Narrator] That feeling of course,
would prove prescient.
We spend several hours plowing through the undergrowth.
(laughing)
And stopping periodically to listen for the signal
from the bird's transmitter.
- [Scientist] Nothing.
Aye aye aye.
- [Scientist] Watch it be on the water today.
- [Narrator] The anxiety grows with each passing hour.
- Let's do some telemetry here.
I think this is a good spot.
Hopefully we can hear it.
- I can't see anything. - Keep our fingers crossed.
(buzzing)
- There's a beat.
(laughing)
- [Scientist] It's not on the water.
(laughing)
- Thank god.
- [Scientist] Hooray, nice. - Woo.
- [Scientist] Oh my gosh.
We didn't hike out here for nothing.
- Can you hear it?
- [Narrator] They zero in on this stand of trees,
but the bird could be nesting on any branch.
The only way to know is to see it fly in or out
during its daily commute.
- I think we should have two stations over here,
and then two people in this gap.
It seems like these people see birds coming across to here.
Those people see them coming across to here.
- [Narrator] That means they're going to have to come back
every morning before dawn to watch, and watch, and watch.
- We have a gap, and you're trying to get that gap
in your whole field of vision,
'cause it takes not even a second, and the bird is gone.
- [Narrator] Murrelets have been clocked
going 100 miles per hour.
This one is slowed down five times,
so if the gap in the canopy is small,
you could blink and miss it.
It took seven trips before they finally saw the bird
fly into its nest.
It might seem ridiculous.
All these people struggling by boat, by plane, and by foot
to find a homely seabird that has evolved a peculiar need
for big mossy branches, but the fate of the murrelet
will help determine the fate of these older trees.
More than three million acres of coastal forests
are protected from logging to preserve the bird,
yet the timber industry
regularly challenges those protections,
and there are still so many questions,
like does thinning nearby forests
present the same threat as clear cutting them?
Both the industry and conservationists
are backing the Oregon Marbled Murrelet Project.
- Having information allows us to have
a better idea of what murrelets need,
and how that can be integrated in management
of our coastal forests that allows
for timber production as well.
- [Narrator] They set up an antenna on a nearby tree,
and another crew comes in regularly
to monitor the nest.
- It hasn't been consistently on the nest
since yesterday morning.
We'll go in and see what we see.
- [Narrator] They'll know for sure
when they check the nearby nest camera,
but Chelsea Klocke and Cassidy Rouge don't have high hopes.
Three of the four nests they've followed
this year have failed.
In some cases, they think a predator got the egg
or one of the parents.
In other cases, the parents might have abandoned the nest
due to other disturbances, or a lack of food at sea.
This may be their last chance to see a chick.
- Curious to see what we're gonna find.
- I know.
- Stressful.
(laughing)
- [Narrator] The mood isn't improved
when they find a pile of feathers likely from a robin
attacked by a predator.
- Yeah, if you lose this many feathers,
that's a pretty bad day for you.
- [Narrator] They head to the base of the tree
with the nest cam,
and login to the feed on a tablet.
- The moment of truth.
(gasping)
What's that?
(gasping)
Yay. - Oh!
(laughing)
- Is that a, oh my god. - Yeah.
- That's a chick.
(laughing)
- Oh my god, that's a chick.
- Yeah.
- [Scientist] There's some movement.
- [Scientist] Amazing.
(laughing)
- This is pretty amazing.
Actually seen the chick in the nest.
It's a little surreal.
- Not only that, but this is incredibly rare footage
from a scientific perspective, especially for Oregon.
- [Narrator] The hope is that their research
can inform decisions about how we manage the forests
and the ocean that will make this bird a little less rare.
- The murrelet's a bird of two worlds,
so having healthy forests and healthy oceans
means that we can also have
healthy murrelet populations as well.