Watch Parrish keep an eye on her flock with ABCNews.com

Julia Parrish

Direct from Tatoosh Island to your desktop: almost-live field reports on the breeding cycle of the common murre.

Julia Parrish, a UW research assistant professor of zoology, is filing twice-weekly reports in text and image to ABCNews.com from her research site on the Washington coast island.

“For nearly a decade, we’ve been following the annual breeding cycle of the common murre, the most prevalent seabird on the island,” says Parrish, a Washington Sea Grant-funded researcher. There are about 5,000 murres nesting on Tatoosh, and while this may seem like a lot, Tatoosh contains one of the smaller colonies in the Pacific Northwest.

Parrish in the field on Tatoosh Island

As part of her studies, Parrish and her student assistants are tagging birds, observing feeding strategies and the effects of predators on the murre colony over a period of three weeks.

Why is this work important?

The murre population at Tatoosh has been steadily declining, Parrish explains. In fact, the total number of murres nesting in Washington is only 10,000 to 15,000, which is potential cause for conservation alarm.

A murre stops for a snack on Tatoosh Island, where that species’ numbers are dwindling.

“One of our long-term research goals is to determine what factors are responsible for the ongoing population decline and, perhaps, to even attempt to redress the problem,” says Parrish.

Viewers are being encouraged to submit questions via e-mail and to compete for a big prize—a glass fishing float from one of island’s remote beaches—in a contest similar to last summer’s wildly popular Win a Shrunken Head event.

Last year’s Washington Sea Grant series of field reports from the deck of the NOAA vessel Ronald Brown was a big hit—both with the general public and the media. For its efforts, WSGP won a 1998 Communicator of Excellence Award from the Washington Press Association and a Totem Award from the Public Relations Society of America.

You can find the field reports at http://ABCNews.go.com/sections/science or in the ABCNews.com archives after Aug. 17. ¶

David G. Gordon, Washington Sea Grant