While paddling next to a honeycombed, wave-battered cliff along East Anacapa Island, a small black-and-white seabird landed awkwardly next to my kayak. It was a Xantus’s murrelet, one of the rarest seabirds in the western Pacific, and one of its main nesting areas is the Channel Islands National Park.
Historically, islands such as Santa Barbara and Anacapa have been vital breeding sites for murrelets, Cassin’s auklets, pigeon guillemots and other seabirds that come ashore for a couple of months during the year to breed, nest and raise their chicks.
Rock outcroppings such as Scorpion Rock just off the southeast end of Santa Cruz Island, Orizaba Rock farther west and the isle’s numerous sea caves are important rookeries for auklets and ashy storm petrels.
“The islands support the largest colonies of breeding habitat in Southern California,” said Annie Little, seabird biologist for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.
The National Park Service is in the middle of maintaining those vital breeding grounds, restoring degraded ones, and encouraging pelagic birds to new and old sites throughout the chain.
The restoration is funded by the Montrose Settlements Restoration Program. Montrose was responsible for dumping hundreds of tons of DDT toxins into the Southern California Bight near Catalina Island in the 1940s and ‘50s. After 10 years of litigation, Montrose was court-ordered in 2000 to pay $140 million, with $30 million going toward restoring natural resources such as bald eagles, peregrine falcons and seabirds. About half of that money has been spent.
Former threats to seabirds on the chain once included feral cats on Santa Barbara Island that wiped out the Cassin’s auklet population in the 1800s, and black rats on Anacapa nearly ended the murrelet population in 2000. The cats were removed in the early 1900s. Black rats were eradicated in 2002. Auklets have been difficult to recover on Santa Barbara Island, but murrelets have rebounded on Anacapa. There are an estimated 5,000 to 12,000 murrelets worldwide, with the Channel Islands supporting 40 percent of the population.
“Santa Barbara Island has the largest U.S. colony,” Little said. “There’s so much restoration potential on the island.”
One way the National Park Service is encouraging seabirds to return to the volcanic archipelago is by ridding invasive non-native plants from the islands and planting natives to increase soil stability. All of the seabirds are crevice nesters, or, like the auklet, they burrow underground.
Another way the Park Service is enhancing restoration efforts is by social attraction. On some of the offshore rock outcroppings, biologists have erected solar panels affixed with MP3 players, light sensors, amplifiers and speakers using seabird calls.
“We’re using nocturnal audio broadcasting to attract seabirds like auklets and ashy storm petrels to potential breeding sites,” Little said.
Slowly but surely it’s working. On Orizaba Rock, there are now four petrel nest sites, and there are about 50 pairs of auklets on Santa Barbara Island.
— Noozhawk contributor and local freelance writer Chuck Graham is editor of Deep magazine.