More than 1,600 sea bird carcasses had washed onto Unalaska shores over two days in September 2006 in a mysterious die-off that scientists are scrambling to understand.

In a collision with a boat, several hundred black, gull-like shearwaters died after flying into a crabbing boat that steamed through the early morning darkness in Unalaska Bay on a Wednesday morning, said Forrest Bowers, a fisheries biologist for the state Department of Fish and Game in Unalaska. The captain of the boat walked into Bowers’ office that day to report that a hail of shearwaters struck his boat for up to 30 minutes, Bowers said. The crew pitched the dead and dying birds overboard, the captain said, according to Bowers.

The Fish and Wildlife Service said they expect the total number of dead birds is much larger than the 1,600 carcasses that have been found and had coordinated a carcass retrieval to get birds delivered to laboratories for testing which is the real way to determine the cause of the dieoff they said. On Thursday August 31st 2006, they were also trying to contact people along the Aleutian Islands and out in the Pribilof Islands to see if they had spotted unusual numbers of dead shearwaters washing ashore — an event that would likely coincide with a natural die-off.

Seabird specialist Art Sowls at the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge in Homer said he had neither heard nor read of massive numbers of shearwaters dying in a collision with a ship or ships.

“It’s not unusual to have birds dying,” he said, but to have hundreds or thousands of them die-off is unusual. He stated further that “Typically, you find a fairly small percentage of the ones that die,” Sowls said.

SEE THE REPORT HERE

Though this topic of bird deaths seems to be little known by most people except those that are directly affected; there have been some very interesting comments across blogs and other news sites which allow reader comments on the apparent mass die-out of birds.

Some are saying that together with the foul scent that pervaded New York around the time of the mass die out of birds in Austin, Texas and which has gone unexplained, that a possible explanation is the sudden emission of Methane gases by the melting permafrost. It was also noted that there have been reports of methane detectors going off at sea on board cargo ships. An interesting theory indeed. Others insist that there is something afoot, not necessarily a conspiracy theory, but something larger on the plate of earth’s natural evolution.

The latter would perhaps be welcomed by the Society for Conservation Biology which holds an annual meeting that was last held in Hawaii, August 2006. The despair was almost palpable amongst the scientists gathered there.

“I’m just glad I’m retiring soon and won’t be around to see everything disappear,” said P. Dee Boersma, former president of the society, during the opening night’s dinner. Other veteran field biologists around the table had murmured in sullen agreement.

At the next morning’s keynote address, Robert M. May, a University of Oxford zoologist who presides over the Royal Society and until last year served as chief scientific adviser to the British government, did his best to disabuse any remaining optimists of their rosy outlook.

According to May’s latest rough estimate, the extinction rate - the pace at which species vanish - accelerated during the past 100 years to roughly 1,000 times what it was before humans showed up. Various lines of argument, he explained, “suggest a speeding up by a further factor of 10 over the next century or so…. And that puts us squarely on the breaking edge of the sixth great wave of extinction in the history of life on Earth.”

Their ‘Termination of the Species Report’ is now available at the Scientific American for $5.00 USD HERE.