'We should be scared to death': Warming oceans will be dire for seabirds, says biologist

As a heat wave made its way through Newfoundland and Labrador earlier this summer, ocean temperatures also rose — but what does that mean for the province's seabird population? 

Memorial University seabird biologist Bill Montevecchi said the impact of the heat is enormous.

"It's absolutely huge," he said. "Even thinking about the avian flu last year we had massive die-offs of birds, tens of thousands of birds just in Newfoundland died last year." And that heat could have contributed to the high mortality rate of infected birds, he said.

Montevecchi said the heat is particularly tough for seabirds because they sit in cliffs, exposed to solar radiation, and the heat can also be harmful to seabird eggs. 

At the beginning of August, he said, most seabird eggs would have hatched, but there are still some that haven't, and there are some nestlings — birds too young to leave the nest. 

Montevecchi said much current research seems to be focused on how cold temperatures affect seabirds and eggs, which he says isn't as much of a problem.

"The bird is sitting on the egg to keep it warm or keep the temperature at least constant," he said. "But in fact, heat stress is a much greater cause of, you know, death to embryos and eggs than cold."

If a parent bird leaves the nest and eggs exposed, he said, it would not take long for those eggs to "essentially be cooked." 

Changes are coming, expert says

Ian Jones, a MUN biology professor who specializes in marine ecology, said Newfoundland and Labrador seabirds are basically very cold water — almost arctic — seabirds.

"So the possibility that the oceans could, and will, warm up is very worrying to seabird biologists, and especially those interested in conservation," he said.

"We could see our seabirds vanish, as they are doing in the Eastern Atlantic, around the British Isles where the sea temperatures are a lot warmer, due to the same phenomenon — global heating brought about by burning fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal." 

Bird watchers are reporting sightings of birds from warmer climates in Newfoundland and Labrador, like the brown booby, which Jones said is a tropical seabird that is moving north. 

"There has been one this year and there was one a couple of years ago," he said. "And this is a bird you would never, you know, you would never have dreamed that you were going to see around here. But it's here because things are warming up."

While Newfoundland and Labrador has not seen the detrimental effects that have been observed in other areas, Jones said, biologists are "abundantly aware" of what's happening with the same species around Britain, Ireland, Norway and the Faroe Islands.

"And there, the temperature of the water has reached a critical stage and seabirds are really failing and disappearing," he said. "We should be scared to death."

As for a timeline for when we might start seeing these effects, Jones said that things have changed drastically in the last decade. 

"We're probably talking about a scale of decades. Or a decade. So, 2030, 2040… seabirds may have vanished here like they are vanishing around the British Isles. So this is really drastic." 

Seabird food supply

And with increasing ocean temperatures, fish are also affected. Montevecchi said that the seabird population is indirectly affected because of the changing food supply.

Fish have a range of tolerance when it comes to water temperatures.

"When the ocean temperature goes above that tolerance, which it is doing now, you know the fish is essentially…has a couple of choices. They can stay and die or it can move to colder water and that usually means diving deeper or potentially going north."

He said the impact of warm water is creating issues for the birds that they probably have not had to deal with as consistently and extremely as right now. 

Jones said he thinks the first sign of these changes will be that parent birds will not be able to find food for their offspring.

He said birds like puffins, turs, kittiwakes and tinkers depend on cold water fish species for food. If we have warming temperatures like the British Isles, he said, there will be breeding failure and then populations will eventually disappear. 

Environment Canada is doing a good job of monitoring seabirds, said Jones, but it's time to shift priorities from monitoring to taking "drastic action" on climate change, including in the extraction and use of fossil fuels.

"The obvious thing to do is stop that immediately. And it's an emergency. This is an emergency," he said. "The emergency is not limited to concerns about seabirds. It's concerns about wildfire basically burning up our boreal forests. And our fisheries. Even our health."

What the province has working for it, he said, is the Labrador Current, which brings a great swath of cold water from the Arctic to Newfoundland's Avalon Peninsula, where seabirds breed. The water gives the birds respite from the drastic changes happening in other areas, like the British Isles.

"I think we need to think about whether we want to have seabirds. Is it a value thing? Is it important that we have seabirds? Like puffins," he said. "And if we decide that we do want to have them, there's drastic and immediate action that we can take to save them from destruction."

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