In 1908 the second of three Alexander Expeditions conducted field work in the Prince William Sound area. From Dixon (1908) and Grinnell (1910) we can derive some basis for assessing status in a very general way. The most common seabird noted was the marbled murrelet. Glaucous-winged gulls and black-legged kittiwakes were common; the glaucous-winged gull was the more common. Horned puffins were judged to be slightly more common than tufted puffins by both authors. The northern end of Montague Strait appears to have been the center of abundance for puffins. Dixon noted that on 16 July 1908 there were swarms of puffins in the channel along Green Island. Pigeon guillemots were common along the rocky coasts. Parakeet auklets (Cyclorrhyncus psittacula), common murres, and ancient murrelets were noted only in very small numbers.
After the Alexander Expeditions there was another doldrum in which little was done. During this lull in activity, a note by Townsend (1913) appeared which compared the numbers of crested auklets (Aethia cristatella) at Yukon Harbor, Big Koniuji Island, to the least auklets (A. pusilla) of St. George Island, stating that the crested auklets were more numerous. He sailed into the Yukon Harbor anchorage on the evening of 1 August and observed that crested auklets "were present in myriads. The surface of the water was covered with them, and the air was filled with them."
The formal record available to researchers is very shallow for this exploratory period. With a few exceptions it was compiled by non-scientists, primarily explorers and egg and skin collectors.
Current Status
Setting the Stage
This paper should be viewed as a conceptual model. While I attempted to be as objective as possible, subjectivity was unavoidable. Many of the tentative conclusions are based on very little data. Each improvement will make it a better management tool. Because of the space limitations, it is not possible to go into a detailed tracking of my reasoning for each species. In an attempt to overcome this handicap, I am including some examples of the sorts of reasoning that went into the process.
In 1973 I led a Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) reconnaissance survey team that was delineating seabird colonies along the Alaska Peninsula. In the Shumagin Islands we entered or crossed Koniuji Strait twice (on 11 and 12 June) without even suspecting the presence of a horned puffin colony. A third passage through the strait (13 June) was not so uneventful. The water and the air were filled with horned puffins. This led to the discovery that the 430-m mountain on the southeastern corner of Big Koniuji was also covered with horned puffins, clear to its top. The minimum estimate of the birds that were visible was 140,000. Even this number of birds would make this the largest horned puffin colony ever discovered. David Spencer (personal communication) had noted similar swarms of horned puffins in this strait in 1956 while flying sea otter surveys in the area. In 1975 a field camp was established at Yukon Harbor, with study of this colony as one of the prime objectives of the investigators. As far as these investigators could tell no such large colony existed there, even though the nesting habitat was still there, unaltered. This sort of event, one of the banes and vagaries of estimating seabird numbers, is not rare.
In 1973, when FWS personnel delineated the colony on the southwestern end of Bird Island in the Shumagins, there were estimated to be 43,000 kittiwakes, 24,000 murres, and 6,000 cormorants present; no tufted puffins were seen about the colony. The last time (in 1970) one of the observers, Edgar Bailey, had visited the colony with Robert Jones, there was an extremely large colony of tufted puffins which Jones (E. Bailey, personal communication) estimated at more than 1 million birds. We made a particular effort to visit Jude Island, between the Shumagin Islands and the Pavlof Islands, because David Spencer (personal communication) had reported once having seen the air over the island filled with an extremely large number of tufted puffins. However, there were no puffins at this colony either.
Let us examine the facts in context. On 8 June we had visited High Island where we had attempted to collect puffin eggs for pesticide analysis, but had been able to find only one egg. Also, there were only 6,000 tufted puffins where George Putney, master/engineer of the Aleutian Tern, had seen much larger numbers in 1972. These two facts could easily be related to explain the current situation because it was still early in the breeding season. The horned puffin observations in Koniuji Strait (11-13 June) were in keeping with this conclusion also—an indication that these birds had not yet settled down to a full breeding effort. The erratic comings and goings of common puffins (Fratercula arctica) early in the season have been well documented (Lockley 1962). It is an easy step to extend this reasoning to the absence of birds at Bird Island on 11 June, even though fresh signs of the characteristic evidence of tufted puffin occupancy were missing. Jude Island provides a different clue, however. There were 3,000 pigeon guillemots, an unheard-of concentration, apparently occupying abandoned tufted puffin burrows on 15 June. Also, on 7 June we had made a very interesting observation that had no special significance at the time: murres on Spitz Island were occupying little parapets created by mashing down the mouths of puffin burrows which filled the slope above the cliff portion of their colony.