A Bird So Elusive That Just Seeing One Is a Quest

Meet the crew determined to catch a glimpse of BC's disappearing marbled murrelet.
By Sarah Cox.
Royann Petrell awakes, almost giddy with excitement, in a small trailer at the end of an overgrown logging road. It's 3:25 a.m. She dresses in layers to buffer the mid-July chill on west Vancouver Island and tightens the purple laces of her hiking boots. Before she retired, she was a professor of chemical and biological engineering at the University of British Columbia. Now she spends her days tromping around old-growth forests with binoculars and recording devices.
The drenching overnight rain has given way to a fine mist, and fog wraps around the ancient forests of Carmanah Walbran Park like a fluffy shawl. The park begins where the logging road ends. Petrell adjusts her camo baseball cap and clicks on her headlamp.
"Welcome to bird camp," says a handwritten sign on construction paper, taped to the side of her homemade trailer.
It's not unusual for Petrell, a co-founder of the citizen science group Old-Growth Birders and BioBlitzers, to rise before dawn to record birds in remote locations on Vancouver Island.
What's far more surprising is that 50 others — scientists, ecologists, seasoned and aspiring birders, artists, parents towing small children — have travelled for more than two hours along bone-rattling logging roads from Lake Cowichan to join her.
They're sleeping in soggy tents and vehicles that line the dirt road and planning to rise at 4 a.m. in the hopes of sighting a secretive bird.
To birders and biologists, the bird is known as a MAMU. American robins are AMRO, for the first two letters of their double-barrelled name. Common ravens are CORA. The marbled murrelet, a bird Petrell affectionately calls a "flying penguin," is a MAMU.
Welcome to the second annual MAMU Day.
The event, organized by Petrell's group and the volunteer group Friends of Carmanah Walbran, aims to raise public awareness about a small, quirky seabird at risk of extinction.
To lift spirits for the task ahead, one participant has brought "marbled murre-licks" — vanilla ice cream dipped in milk chocolate on a stick, with a chocolate stencil of a MAMU. The ice cream's colours mimic the bird's summer plumage, with hints of cinnamon and rust on its darker back, its underside a marbled cream and brown.
"We're gonna have attitude," Petrell tells everyone gathered around a campfire last night in the spitting rain. "I want to see sass!"
She played a tape of the most common marbled murrelet call, the sound the birds make when flying to their nest tree. The call is high-pitched and plaintive. It haunts long after you first hear it: keer keer keer.
The murrelets, which are about the size of a robin but weigh three times as much, are far more likely to be seen and heard when it's foggy and they're forced to fly low, giving rise to their nicknames: fog bird and fog lark. Even if Petrell had waved a magic wand, she couldn't have conjured up better weather for today's mission.
Nesting in old-growth forests
Catching a glimpse of a marbled murrelet is not like other birdwatching adventures, where you stand silently, binoculars in hand, scanning for movement. Murrelets are chunky little fighter jets. They easily clock speeds of 100 or 120 kilometres an hour. They're on a stealth mission: to deliver food to their chick without being spotted by a baby-snatcher like a raven or crow.
But they're a diving seabird, ill-equipped for life in the old-growth forests along B.C.'s coast where they incongruously nest. Their wings are stubby, and their feet are webbed. They can't slow down, so they plunge through a gap in the forest canopy and execute an aerial stall. They land — if they're lucky — on the branch where their single chick waits, snug in a bed of moss, for a small fish its parents carried in their beaks for up to 50 kilometres.
It's a small wonder that marbled murrelets exist at all.
Five years ago, Petrell, an avid birder, knew almost nothing about marbled murrelets...