"California's Galapagos" sees a rebound of its residents

SOUTHEAST FARALLON ISLAND, Calif. — The first thing the rare visitor notices upon landing here are the gulls — thousands of nesting, protective, angry, screaming gulls.

They're everywhere, on the hillsides and along the trails. They're even in the trails. And they're upset.

It's nesting season in the largest seabird-breeding colony in the continental United States, a biological explosion 28 miles west of the Golden Gate.

Today, nearly 300,000 birds are here, more than two-thirds of which are common murres, shy black-and-white birds that can dive almost 600 feet to catch a fish. Congregated close together, they look like a colony of penguins.

But it's those angry, in-your-face gulls that let humans know they are intruding. In a few weeks, the gulls will become even more aggressive.

"All through June you have to wear hard hats," said Saralys Kissler, an intern for the Point Reyes Bird Observatory, which has been monitoring bird populations here since 1968.

Hiking down a trail that leads from the islands' lighthouse, Kissler mentions she was pecked in the head earlier in the day. "It hurts. They can make you bleed."

There were once three times as many breeding birds here, before Gold Rush-era egg collecting, oil spills, pesticides, food depletion, gill-net fishing and other problems devastated the seabirds of the Farallones.

The declines are now reversing.

During the past five years, several seabird populations have begun to rebound. One researcher estimates that, barring disaster, the bird populations will take off in the next two to three years.

"I'm making the prediction that we are going to see very large population increases," said Bill Sydeman, marine-ecology director for the Point Reyes Bird Observatory.

The Farallon Islands are sometimes referred to as California's Galapagos Islands, after the teeming South American islands Charles Darwin visited in 1831.

By oceanographic accident, this 211-acre archipelago is perfectly situated for biological richness.

It sits in a place where ocean currents, the topography of the ocean floor and the shore all combine to create an explosion of plankton, which in turn forms the foundation for a food web that feeds tiny microscopic organisms to the largest animals on Earth, blue whales.

Besides researchers, contractors and the occasional reporter, few visitors are allowed to land on the island.

Those who do must take a 2 ½-hour boat ride to reach the granite peaks of these great underwater mountains

From a boat, hundreds of murres can be seen standing around in a large cave, while elephant seals and California sea lions flop on a small beach.

Gray whales feed in the shallows, occasionally rolling a back through the surface and showing their flukes before diving to the bottom to scoop a mouthful of the bottom-muck to filter for food.

Four or five researchers live on the island. An additional 30 or so contractors visit each year to do maintenance or other kinds of work.

Other than that, only about 15 people annually actually set foot on the islands.

The island topography is rugged and the seas are rough. Landing is a little complicated. Visitors first have to transfer from a fishing boat onto a skiff that takes them to a cove. There, a contraption called a Billy Pugh is lowered by crane onto the skiff. Visitors step onto the Billy Pugh, a bright orange hoop with some netting, and the crane lifts them over a cliff and swings four visitors at a time onto the island.

That's when you meet the gulls.

There are 18,000 of them on the Farallones. It's the largest nesting colony of western gulls in the world. It sounds bigger than that.

The secret to the Farallones' biological wealth begins a few miles to the west, where the ocean floor falls away thousands of feet.

When the winds kick up in the spring and summer, the warmer surface water is pushed south. Colder, deeper water rises from the depths in a process called upwelling.

Cold water also comes in with the current from the north.

Together, these cold, nutrient-rich waters flow around the island.

The nutrients trigger huge phytoplankton blooms. Krill and other tiny animals start feeding on the microscopic plantlike organisms. They, too, proliferate. The basis of an incredibly rich food web is formed.

Blue, gray and humpback whales come here. So do all sorts of dolphins, porpoises, seals and sea lions.

There are rockfish, shellfish, anchovies, sardines and migrating salmon. In late summer and fall, leatherback sea turtles come to feed on the jellyfish. In the fall, great white sharks arrive in great numbers to feed on seals and sea lions

A dozen species of seabirds nest on the island, including tufted puffins, black oystercatchers and rhinoceros auklets named for their distinctive beak.

"Land happens to be located exactly where you'd want it to be located to facilitate this reproduction," said Sydeman, of the Point Reyes Bird Observatory. "It's right in the middle of the feeding trough, if you will."

At one time, murres probably numbered near 1 million, Sydeman said. Most of the other bird populations were higher than they are now, though reliable numbers are hard to come by.

Western gulls are an exception. Sydeman said their numbers have increased, aided by the trash they can pick through on the mainland and the wholesale slaughter of fur seals that once dominated much of the island's terrace that is now occupied by the nesting gulls.

Before the Gold Rush, few people visited the Farallones. In 1769, Sir Francis Drake sailed here and killed seals for their meat. Russian sealers followed in the 1800s and killed off all the fur seals and elephant seals, according to the Oceanic Society.

When gold was discovered in the Sierra and San Francisco's population boomed, opportunists came to the Farallones to collect murre eggs that they could sell for $1 a dozen in the city. There were no chicken farms then to supply eggs to the city's restaurants and markets.

Between 1850 and 1875, 6 million murre eggs were taken from the islands.

By 1910, the murre's population plummeted from nearly 1 million to 10,000, or somewhere around 1 percent of their historic population.

The egg collecting ended, but new threats emerged. Oil spills, from leaky tankers and sloppy marine practices, killed birds. The now-banned pesticide DDT caused problems as well.

Between 1982 and 1986, somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 murres were drowned in gill nets off the Northern California coast. Gill nets have been, for all practical purposes, banned off the coast of Northern California since 2000.

"A lot of murres were killed in the '70s and '80s by the gill-net fishing," said Joelle Buffa, the Farallones National Wildlife Refuge manager. "All of them [sea-bird species] are steadily rebuilding."

One of the reasons for the recent increase in sea birds, biologists say, is that the Pacific Ocean entered a new long-term cold-water phase in the late 1990s. The shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation followed about 22 years in a warmer water phase.

Since the shift, there has been more food around the Farallones. Birds are producing more chicks. In the next few years, those chicks will return to nest in greater numbers. "We are going to see exponential population growth on the Farallones," Sydeman said.

For a variety of reasons, ranging from better ocean conditions to crackdowns on pesticides, oil spills, hunting and gill nets, the other animals are getting healthier, too.

Elephant seals were thought to be extinct in the late 1800s before a small colony was discovered on an island off Baja California. As their population recovered, the elephant seals started establishing colonies in California and in 1972, an elephant seal pup was born on the Farallones. Today, about 500 elephant seals show up here each year

Northern fur seals once numbered as many as 50,000 on the Farallones before they were wiped out by hunting. Today, northern fur seal populations are crashing in the Bering Sea, and overall the seals are faring poorly.

But in 1996, they began recolonizing the Farallones. There are now 20 to 30 breeding northern fur seals on the islands.

"It's one of the few bright spots in the whole northern fur seal population," Sydeman said.