Newfoundland razorbills invade murre colonies

GREG YOUNGER-LEWIS

Not only Newfoundlanders are migrating north.

Their fish and birds are coming too.

In a suspected sign of global warming, Newfoundland’s razorbill birds, a goofy penguin-like bird that crowds Atlantic cliffs and islands by the thousands, are infiltrating the colonies of Nunavut’s and Nunavik’s thick-billed murre, a black-and-white bird that migrate to the region from warmer climes for the summer months.

At the same time, Nunavut and Nunavik murres — known in Inuktitut as akpa — are feasting on unprecedented numbers of capelin, a fish that usually calls the north Atlantic ocean home. In the past two years, capelin have been mysteriously showing up in droves in the High Arctic near Resolute, where they’d never been seen before.

Scientists aren’t sounding any alarm bells, but many of them researching murres believe that the Newfoundland bird coming from the South, plus the new source of fish, are likely signs of global warming.

According to researchers, the appearance of the razorbill birds and capelin in the eastern Arctic aren’t likely to have a big impact on the ecosystem right now, but they reflect a larger climatic change that could affect hunting regulations.

Mark Mallory, a seabird biologist with the Canadian Wildlife Service who has been researching the birds for several years, said Canada is legally obligated to watch out for the murre under an international agreement called the Migratory Birds Convention Act. That means policy-makers would have to consider reducing hunting of the bird if the murres face new threats to their numbers, such as the effects of global warming.

“We also have a moral obligation,” he said from his office in Iqaluit this week. “These changes are probably caused by man.”

Mallory said he’s not worried about the Newfoundland birds threatening the murre. They are only showing up in small handfuls among Nunavik and Nunavut’s estimated three million murres. Plus, they already co-exist back in Newfoundland.

He’s also not worried about hunting pressures on murres in Nunavut or Nunavik because few communities harvest the bird and its eggs anymore. Most murre hunting in the North takes place on Akpatok Island in Ungava Bay, and Digges Island near Ivujivik.

Residents of Pond Inlet also traditionally harvest murre eggs on Bylot Island.

Moreover, any changes in hunting regulations would mainly affect Greenland and Newfoundland, where the murres nest in the winter months.

The real environmental threat to murres comes, Mallory said, with the loss of ice cover in northern Hudson Bay.

Mallory explained that murres have better success nesting when there is more ice in the southern areas, presumably because fish gather in the thin ice breaks in such a way that birds find more to eat. Less ice around the murre colonies near Nunavik, where most of these birds nest in the summer, might lead to long-term changes in populations.

Mallory also pointed to the threats caused by increases in temperature in the region, identified by Canadian murre expert Tony Gaston, who has been visiting the murre colonies around Nunavut and Nunavik since the early 1980s.

In recent years, Gaston has noted that the murres are suffocating from heat where they didn’t before.

The heat also brings more mosquitoes. More than a nuisance, the mosquitoes are actually killing the relatively small murre.

“Literally, the birds are dying from the heat and from having the blood sucked from their feet,” Mallory said.

Mallory said the researchers will continue studying the birds in hopes of gathering more solid evidence of how their habitats are changing.

While a lot of seabird research focuses on well-known murre colonies like Prince Leopold Island near Resolute, Mallory plans to head to a lesser known razorbill bird habitat on Loks Land at the mouth of Frobisher Bay in the near future.