At the workstation, Patton and Thomas arrive holding auklets, with Good bringing one up behind them. The birds scratch with their sharp toe claws and bite with their strong bills, and when that does not work they moan their distress. An assembly line forms. Pearson measures auklets and bands them, and then passes them off to Frankfurter and Haman, who take a swab from their cloaca and draw a couple of drops of blood from a vein in the wing.
Back on the hillside, auklets are hitting the net with greater frequency. Hodum brings them over faster than Pearson, Frankfurter, and Haman can process them. There are eight of them now. The excess ones go into blue cloth bags until Pearson is ready for them. “I’m going as quick as I can,” he says, trying to reassure them, but the bags still jerk and twitch and moan.
Finding a baseline
Where Frankfurter’s needs are perhaps more generally investigative, Katie Haman’s have a more specific application: Oil spill response. “We want to establish some solid baselines with the assumption that there might be a massive oil spill in the area someday,” she says. “Having those baselines would help wildlife health officials respond in such an event.”
Initially, Haman’s project was aimed at marbled murrelets, but she and her coworkers later decided to switch to rhinoceros auklets in part because they are far more abundant. Her work with them will focus on acute phase proteins. Acute phase proteins, she says, are a component of the innate immune response; they increase or decrease in response to inflammation. Researchers working in the early 1900s first identified them as initial reactants to infectious diseases. Studies by Carolyn Cray at the University of Miami, with whom Haman is collaborating, have shown that they are good biomarkers whose levels correspond with infection, stress, trauma, or other symptoms; and in some species, they can serve as prognostic indicators of survival.
“The goal is to show that we can establish baselines,” Haman says. In the event of trauma, be it pathological or otherwise, the levels of those proteins increase detectably, enough so that they can establish a clinical variable. For although Protection Island is a wildlife refuge, sources of potential traumas surround it. Just across the border, near Vancouver, British Columbia, the Port of Vancouver is in the midst of building a second terminal. Combined with the eventual completion of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline promises a significant increase in area ship traffic.
Should there be an oil spill, wildlife health response officials could potentially triage birds based on their APP levels. The need for triage can be critical during such a catastrophe event, where hundreds, or even thousands, of alcids may strand. Already wildlife rehabilitation is an expensive enterprise, made more so by pouring scant resources into saving animals that are likely to die no matter how much help they receive. “A lot of times you’re completely overwhelmed with sick animals,” Haman says. “So it would be great to have a rapid screening test.”
Whatever Haman finds with rhinoceros auklets could also be applied to other species of general conservation concern, such as marbled murrelets or tufted puffins. “The general state of seabird disease in Salish Sea is not well known,” she says, laughing a little grimly. “Honestly, that’s what we’ve been saying for years. One of the biggest complaints of wildlife health is no one wants to do baseline work. But then we find ourselves in situations where a population is declining and we just don’t know about its general health, and that makes recovery efforts all the more difficult.”
Letting them go
At 11:30 p.m. or so, the action at the mist nets has died down. A few auklets buzz overhead from time to time, but they are bound for different parts of the colony. Some of these birds might also be non-breeders, coming in simply to prospect or socialize. They wander out in the open, their calls wafting over the slopes as they serenade one another: Waa-Waaaaa, Waa-Waaaaa.