Across a Fevered Pacific Ocean, Seabirds Are Starving

Morro Bay, California — Half a mile inland from the Pacific Ocean, a woman carries a bird wrapped in a towel as she approaches the nonprofit Pacific Wildlife Care (PWC), San Luis Obispo County’s only licensed wildlife rehabilitation center. Her curly-haired toddler putters beside her, gazing anxiously up at the avian friend they found struggling in the sand moments earlier.

“At first we thought she might be dead, but then we saw her move her head around a bit…” the mother notes as she hands the murre—peering out of its cozy wrap—to Kelley Boland, PWC’s development coordinator.

If there’s any chance the center can help, they will, says Boland, a conservation ecologist.

In typical years without major marine heat waves, PWC admits around 100 murres, a duck-sized seabird commonly found along the West Coast. But when surface waters heat up—driven by climate-fueled marine heatwaves and compounded by El Niño events—forage fish like anchovies and sardines plunge into deeper, cooler thermoclines to survive. While murres are exceptional divers, they’re being forced repeatedly to their physical limits in search of fleeing prey and quickly burning more calories than they can catch, causing many to starve.

In 2015, warm El Niño waters collided with an anomalous marine heat wave nicknamed ‘The Blob,’ and PWC admitted a record 556 emaciated murres. Between September 1 and November 2 of this year, the center has already received an unprecedented 922 murres. The crisis crested during a coastal heat wave between October 9 and 11, when 194 animals—164 of which were murres—were brought to the clinic in three days. On those same dates in 2025, PWC received just 11 animals total.

The modest center is tucked behind the dunes a few coastal towns south of the sheer headlands of Big Sur, where a 580-foot volcanic plug known as Morro Rock anchors the edge of the continent, splitting the calm estuary of Morro Bay from the raw, open ocean. Around its striking, weather-worn flanks, cormorants dive through the swell while long-billed curlews probe the mudflats.

To those who live along this raw stretch of Central California, seabirds are constant companions. But during this extraordinarily warm autumn, as beachgoers and surfers have congregated on the shore, they’ve confronted a stark crisis. Scattered just above the high tide line, among the usual sprinkle of sand dollars and piles of gnarled kelp, folks have been finding dead common murres every few feet.

“Many stressors are converging at once,” notes Bolland, “and it’s creating a perfect storm for the murres.”

When murre populations are healthy, thousands of the two-pound birds—with their slate-black wings and stark white bellies—float in raft-like unison across twenty-foot swells. As waves curl toward the rocks, murres rise with the crest, gathering momentum to sweep skyward in a synchronized sheet of dark wings before launching through the spray.

“It’s one of the most beautiful visuals that I’ve ever experienced,” says Julia Parrish, a University of Washington researcher who went on to found the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team, which trains beachgoers to track marine mortality along the Pacific shore.

Nesting on archipelagos from the coast of San Francisco up to the Gulf of Alaska, thousands of common murres gather in a constant, rolling cacophony. Yet amid their continuous chorus, each bird can distinguish the unique voice of its own mate and chick within the colony. Murres are the world’s densest nesting birds, relying on deep communal bonds to survive. Because they return to their exact birthplace for up to 25 years, colonies function as tightly knit, multigenerational families where neighbors protect each other’s chicks while parents forage at sea.

To survive and complete their arduous journey home, common murres must consume an immense amount of food relative to their size. They are exceptional divers, using their wings to propel themselves to depths reaching 591 feet. But they do most of their hunting between 60 and 160 feet, chasing small forage fish and invertebrates. It is an energy-demanding way to feed, and when warming waters drive fish even deeper, the birds spend more calories hunting than they gain from their catch.

During their late-summer molt, this deficit can become fatal. As murres drop their feathers, temporary gaps are left in their insulation—a breach akin to a large hole in a diver's wetsuit. Without proper thermal protection, ocean water saps their remaining core heat, making deep dives impossible. Weakened, hypothermic, and starving, they can no longer fight the shoreward currents.

“They’re arriving in really poor condition. Many are severely emaciated,” says Boland. “When a bird has gone without adequate food for a prolonged period, the effects go beyond weight loss and can include serious impacts on organ function.”

Boland and Parrish note that this current crisis is part of a broader disruption across the Pacific, driven by a powerful El Niño interacting with persistent marine heatwaves that have broken historic temperature records across the coast. The ecological shifts have rippled across the latitude lines: warm-water sea turtles have nested on Southern California beaches, disoriented dolphins have ended up deep inside the Morro Bay estuary, and now starving murres are washing ashore by the hundreds.

These circumstances follow an ominous precedent. During the region's 'Blob' heat wave, compounded by the 2015–2016 El Niño, mass casualties were found in every tier of the food web, as die-offs claimed everything from salmon and starving sea lion pups to humpback whales and sunflower sea stars up and down the West Coast.

Parrish and her research team estimated that this compounded crisis killed four million common murres in Alaska. As detailed in a 2024 study published in the journal Science, this staggering toll stands as the largest climate-driven mass mortality event among wildlife in the modern era.

“That’s half of Alaska’s population of murres, and twenty percent of the global population, that died within just three months,” notes Parrish. Ten years later, population abundance surveys show no evidence of recovery. And Parrish points out that the birds currently being found on California beaches likely represent only a fraction of the actual deaths. The chances of a murre dying miles out at sea and drifting all the way to shore are low.

“Now we have evidence that extreme and persistent climate events can even push a large swath of a common population to the edge,” Parrish notes. “We didn’t think we’d have to worry about common murres because they’re common,” she says, “And yet here we are, worrying about them.”

As the crow flies, three hundred miles north of Morro Bay—past the rolling hills and inland valleys of Steinbeck country—International Bird Rescue (IBR) in Fairfield, California has also seen an influx of sick and dying murres.

The center has seen major die-offs before. In 2015, roughly 600 live murres were brought through their doors.

This year, staff at IBR started noticing starving birds in the spring, their half-molted bodies a sign they lacked the energy to grow their new feathers. Around six months later, local waters remain warm and prey is scarce, so clinic staff must drive recovered murres three hours or so north to release them into cooler, nutrient-rich waters.

With ocean temperatures showing little sign of immediate relief, incoming El Niño storms threaten to drive even more exhausted murres onto the sand. Up and down the coast, staff at Pacific Wildlife Care and International Bird Rescue are bracing for a busy winter.

Because most murres arrive severely emaciated and near total organ failure, survival rates are low. Still, rescuers provide round-the-clock care for every bird—focusing on stabilizing them through the critical first 24 hours. Inside the narrow confines of PWC’s rehabilitation center, volunteers and veterinary staff move in a practiced choreography. Every inch of the small space is put to use. Racks of ventilated incubators and warm tubs line the hallways, filling the air with the sharp, unmistakable musk of hundreds of fish-eating seabirds packed together.

Phones ring constantly with new beach stranding reports, yet the staff and volunteers remain energized. A veterinarian gently lifts a murre's wing to inspect the worn plumage underneath, while a rehabilitation technician fills out a chart logging body temperatures and fluid schedules on whiteboards.

Every bird moves through a precise, individualized treatment plan after being assessed at intake. They’re then shifted between incubators and warming tubs, given oral fluids and nutrient-rich fish slurries, and regularly reassessed.

Outside, beneath the towering eucalyptus trees, the murres go on the final phase of their recovery journey. They splash and dive through round, sunlit tanks—chirping in soft, fluttery trills as they tilt their beaks upward and kick their tiny, webbed feet as tumbling, aerated bubbles are piped into the large tubs.

Recently, four of PWC’s murres recovered enough to return home. On a clear day in early November, a harbor patrol boat carrying them out to cooler waters paused just beyond the massive dome of Morro Rock, where the Pacific stretched out entirely smooth and luminous under the morning sun. Raising her binoculars, Boland scanned the horizon for signs of other murres riding the swells. She worries this year is a preview of deeper climate shifts ahead, but she remains committed to helping as many animals as she can.

As she unlatches the polypropylene transport crates, the murres explode into motion, tumbling out onto the glassy water with a chorus of zealous chirps and beating wings. They dive instantly, resurfacing in a tight foursome before finding their rhythm and kicking out toward the open sea. Boland smiles at these little seabirds of the big open ocean. “Good luck, friends,” she says.