Episode 61: Marbled Murrelets (in English)

Episode 61 - Marbled Murrelet

This transcript is generated by A.I. and edited by humans for correctness, accuracy, spelling, and syntax or punctuation errors.

00:00 Introduction to In the Woods Podcast

00:34 Meet Your Host and Today's Topic

00:45 Exploring the Marbled Murrelet

01:05 Challenges in Studying Marbled Murrelets

02:37 Unique Nesting Habits of Marbled Murrelets

09:04 Technological Approaches to Studying Murrelets

17:52 Impacts of Ocean Behavior on Murrelets

21:05 Conservation and Future Research

27:41 Lightning Round and Closing Remarks

[00:00:00] Introduction to In the Woods Podcast

[00:00:00] Lauren Grand: From the Oregon State University's Extension Service, you are listening to In the Woods with the Forestry and Natural Resources Program. This podcast brings the forest to listeners by sharing the stories and voices of forest scientists, land managers, and enthusiastic members of the public. Each episode, we will bring you research and science-based information that aims to offer some insight into what we know and are still learning about forest science and management. Stick around to discover a new topic related to forests on each episode.

[00:00:34] Meet Your Host and Today's Topic

[00:00:34] Lauren Grand: Well, thank you for joining us on another episode of In the Woods. I'm Lauren Grand, Oregon State University, extension Forester and Associate Professor of Practice, and I'll be your host for today's episode.

[00:00:45] Exploring the Marbled Murrelet

[00:00:45] Lauren Grand: Today we're gonna be talking about a very special bird.

The marbled murrelet is one of the Pacific Northwest's most mysterious seabirds. It nests in old growth forests and spends much of its life at sea. In this episode, I get the pleasure of talking to Dr. Jim Rivers from Oregon State University to explore the groundbreaking research that he does in his la[00:01:05] Challenges in Studying the Marbled Murrelet

[00:01:05] Lauren Grand: on this elusive bird. We'll discuss the challenges of studying murrelets, the latest discoveries about their behavior and habitat needs. And what conservation efforts are needed to protect them. So hopefully you're fascinated by the intersection of forest ecology, wildlife conservation, and cutting-edge research because you're gonna get a treat today.

[00:01:24] Guest Introduction: Dr. Jim Rivers

[00:01:24] Lauren Grand: Welcome back to the podcast, Jim.

[00:01:27] Dr. Jim Rivers: Great to be back.

[00:01:28] Lauren Grand: Yeah, I'm glad to have you here. I think last time I talked to you into telling us the fascinating stories about pollinators and their roles in forest ecosystems, and I ended the episode with a promise that I'd make you come back to talk about marbled murrelet.

So, thank you so much for taking me up on that.

[00:01:43] Dr. Jim Rivers: Of course.

[00:01:45] Lauren Grand: So, since then you've been up to probably quite a bit. Do you wanna give listeners a reminder about who you are and what you've been up to since then?

[00:01:52] Dr. Jim Rivers: Sure. So, I am a professor in the College of Forestry and I'm a wildlife biologist. So, a lot of the work that I do in the field for research is related to understanding how animals make their living out in our managed forest landscapes.

And you mentioned pollinators, so that's one of the two groups I work on, focusing on native bees, and then the other are birds, often birds that are nesting in forests and trying to understand how they make a living relative to natural disturbances and to anthropogenic disturbances.

[00:02:23] Lauren Grand: It's pretty cool and it's pretty difficult for me to go out into the field or on-site visits with landowners and not have a conversation about birds or pollinators when we're out in their forest.

So, it's important field of study. Thanks for helping us get all that information. Okay.

[00:02:37] Marbled Murrelet's Unique Nesting Habits

[00:02:37] Lauren Grand: Well, we're gonna talk today about a very specific bird, a marbled murrelet, and maybe some people are familiar with it, but some might not be. So, can you start with just an overview of who this bird is, a little bit about how it makes its living and why it's so unusual?

[00:02:54] Dr. Jim Rivers: Sure. So, a marbled murrelet is a small seabird that is found along the Pacific coast. It varies in its range from California all the way up in to the Ellucian Islands in Alaska. And, It is highly unusual for its nesting behavior because it's a seabird and it's related to puffins. It's in the Auk family, so if your listeners know puffins or murres, this is a close relative to those two species, and as a seabird, it gets all of its food from the ocean.

So it's not all that different from its cousins, but how it's different evolutionarily, is it's evolved this behavior where instead of nesting in large social colonies right along water's edge, this bird disperses inland and nests over very large distances and they nest in older forests, typically old growth, but sometimes late successional forest as well.

And the challenge with working with this bird in terms of its nesting is that there aren't colonies of murrelets that you find in the forest. They're dispersed and. They're very secretive. They're very elusive as they go into their nest sites. They're trying to be evasive to predators and have as, as a quiet a presence as possible during their nesting period, and so they can go up to, we have records of 40, 50 miles inland where nest sites have been located.

It's typically not that far, but they do cover a lot of distances, and they commute back and forth to those nests on a daily basis, either when they're incubating the eggs or when they're feeding the offspring.

[00:04:23] Lauren Grand: So, they are unique in that they sort of don't nest in colonies like their other cousin seabirds and they nest in older forests.

So, you mentioned a little bit that that might be because of trying to be elusive from predators. What other reasons might they nest in older forest? Or are there any specific features of the older forest that they look for?

[00:04:45] Dr. Jim Rivers: Yeah. What murrelets are looking for when they go inland for a nest site is a really large tree and a large tree that has large horizontal limbs because the species actually doesn't build a nest as much as it, it kind of creates a little hollow depression on a limb.

And because of that, they often require a good, um, thick mat of moss on horizontal limbs. And the limbs have to be horizontal because you can imagine that the egg won't stay on if it's, if the, the limb is at some sort of an angle. So, they're looking for limbs that are large enough to accommodate the chick and themselves when they come in to to feed it.

And so that typically means that they are in older forests. And as I mentioned earlier, old growth in late successional forests. So, we're talking trees that may be 2, 3, 400 years old, may be several hundred feet tall. And because they don't build a nest, it's nearly possible to see these birds land on the nest site when they come in.

They usually do it under the course of darkness. In the early morning hours, the late day hours come in very quickly. This bird has a commuting speed of about 60 to 70 miles an hour, and it's been clocked on radar in a dive close to a hundred miles an hour. So it's very fast, it's very small. It's about the size of a robin, and when it comes in, it doesn't call, it doesn't make any sound.

It's trying to be as furtive as possible, and in fact, murrelets are one of the few species of auks that when they molt into their breeding feathers, The plumage that they have is very drab, and it's, it's designed to be a camouflage pattern where some of our other auks like tufted puff is, which your, your readers or your listeners may be familiar with, have very, very colorful plumage.

They have these bright yellow feathers on their head. Their bill gets bright orange and blue where it's go in the exact opposite direction. They're trying to be furtive and not seen at all.

[00:06:30] Lauren Grand: That's really interesting. I didn't know that. That seems like the opposite of everything. You hear that usually they wanna be very showy and exciting to find a partner.

[00:06:38] Dr. Jim Rivers: Yeah, and when they sit on the nest, they the, they incubate the egg. One of the interesting things about murrelets and what helps us find their nest, I think we may get to this, is that the male and female share the incubation duties. And so they do so for about 24 hours at a stretch and then they swap back and forth and during the day, the bird when it's incubating the egg, whether it's the male or the female in the pear and there is just one egg that's incubated, they barely move. And we have video footage of birds on the nest during the day. And all you can see for movement is the bird's eye blinking every, every minute or so, it just sits locked still.

And it, again, it's designed to try and blend in and not look like anything in the forest environment that might be, um, a potential food item for something like, uh, Steller's Jay or a common raven, which are two species that are often found depredating murrelet nests.

[00:07:26] Lauren Grand: Okay. I'm glad you touched on that. I was just gonna ask that, it sounds like most of their you know, habits in terms of where they're mating and, and sitting on their choosing as their nesting sites are, seem to be, to avoid predator issues because it sounds like they only have one egg at a time.

[00:07:44] Dr. Jim Rivers: Yeah, that's right. And it's a single egg. It takes about a month to incubate completely and with continuous incubation from the male and the female, as I said, and then that chick,

it develops over a four to six week period, depending on how much food it's being fed. So, you think about that, that's two to two and a half months long where that nest is trying to avoid predation. So, the parents are as stealthy as they can be, which makes our job a lot more challenging. And it perhaps is not surprising to learn that this is the murrelet is the species with its last nest formally described by scientists.

It wasn't until 1974 when we finally knew that murrelets were nesting in trees and that there was a formal documentation by scientists. So it's eluded, eluded people for a long time. In fact, there was a, I think there was a hundred dollars bounty on locating the nests and having evidence that would allow us to know that the birds truly nest in trees.

Because in the northern part of the range, they can nest on cliff faces that are inland from the coast. And they do that in British Columbia. They do that a little bit in Washington. They don't do that in Oregon or California, so they, they are nesting in kind of a similar site where they're up high. But whether or not they were a tree or ground nester was unclear for a long time.

[00:08:56] Lauren Grand: Wow. Okay. That's pretty interesting too. So it's been a short amount of time that we've gotten a lot of details about how these birds live. Let's talk about that a little bit.

[00:09:04] Technological Approaches to Studying Murrelets

[00:09:12] Lauren Grand: So, you know, as they've been difficult to study, I'm sure there's been more and more technology and new methods that had to be created to be able to find ways to study a bird that didn't wanna be found. So what are some of the things that your lab has been doing and other scientists have been doing to try to figure out how to learn more about their nesting habits?

[00:09:23] Dr. Jim Rivers: So there have been a number of different approaches used, and many of them have not been especially successful, including some that we've tried in our lab.

The easiest ways to find murrelet nests are to go to areas where murrelets historically have been and look for them coming and going, and if you find the right flight path, you potentially can see a bird come into its nest. The problem with that is that you have to select á priori where that location is going to be.

What that leads to is the possibility of finding a nest, but it may not be a random sample of the potential locations where a nest might be. So what we did in our study was that we used VHF telemetry tags. These are tags that give off a pinging sound in the very high frequency range and tell people, it's not unlike if you ever watch a submarine movie like The Hunt for Red October, and there's a sound of a submarine going off or being detected.

Kinda like how EHF works, there's just a constant sound. We have receivers that we can dial into and we can actually hear it. And what that does is it gives us an idea of where the bird is. The challenge with that is that you have to be within a few kilometers of where the bird is located to, to pick up on that sound.

They don't go for miles and miles, and for that reason we started by saying, well, could we do better? Could we use some of this new technology where we have GPS tracking tags that communicate with satellites for the birds? We tried those, but they just didn't work very well for murrelets, in part because they weren't designed for a diving bird.

And murrelets are because they're seabirds, are diving underwater after their prey, they need to have a tag that's very, has very limited drag on them. And so the tags that we tried, we didn't think that they were suitable for the birds and we just tried a few and we went back to this VHF tag. So what that means is that we can use that tag effectively, and that's what previous researchers have used as well.

But it requires a huge effort. And part of that effort is to spread out a large number of technicians every morning on the coast to look for the birds and try to figure out where they are in the near shore environment. And then also having a plane on, basically on retainer, waiting for the times when we have a bird that is detected in the ocean environment one morning and then it's missing the next, and then it's back on the water the third day and it's missing the fourth.

And what that on off pattern suggests is that the bird is going in for one of those incubation bouts and it's staying in there. So when that happens, that triggers us to go in and look for that particular bird. Now, each of these VHF tags have a separate individual signature so we can know which bird has been missing from the group of birds that we have tagged, and that's where the plane gets up.

It starts traversing the coast range. Fortunately, these birds are sitting on the nest during that incubation pair. They're not moving, and they're pretty high in trees. So that means that the plane, if it gets up high enough, could pick up the tag, and then it's a matter of honing in on that location over and over.

And so we have a technician. We'd get up in the plane and fly into concentric circles and then that would give us a GPS point of where the bird was generally located. Then we had to hike in with a bigger crew to try and figure out which potential nest tree the bird was in. And then that's not always easy to do because the VHF tags that we used, the radio signals bounce off of large objects and so they, when they hit trees or cliff faces, they bounce all over the place and it can be really challenging to determine which tree the bird is in just from telemetry alone. So what that means is that our crew would have to go out in the pre dawn hours, get up at two in the morning, hike into these sites before dawn, and look up to the sky near these potential nest trees to try and detect the birds coming in and going by just visually detecting them.

So that would work quite well, but sometimes it would take a day, sometimes it would take a week, depending on conditions and other constraints of the crew and of the site. So. Ultimately that's what we went with. But one of the shortcuts that I thought we could use effectively was to use drones with thermal imaging cameras.

And I'd heard a lot about using them to find this in other projects. And I said, boy, this seems like a great opportunity for us to do the same. And so we partnered with Oceans Un-Manned, which is a an NGO with a couple of retired NOAA pilots, and they've gone from flying aircraft to flying drones. And we got out, we had FLIR donate a camera for us to use.

We mounted it to the drone and we did some test trials with Coturnix Quail, these small Japanese quail that we put up in cages in the, the canopy of the trees and the guys flying the drones came in and found them. And we were very excited that this would be something we could use. But we found when we tested this on murrelet Nest, that we had already located that it just didn't work because the murrelets.

They get very low on the nest and they don't give off much of a signal, and when the drone would go around the perimeter of the branches in a given tree, there weren't many windows that they could look into and see that thermal signature, and they had to do this in real time on a tablet. There was no way to to do it except to have some one person driving on flying the drone and one person watching on the tablet saying, oh, I think I see something.

Go left, go right. What we found was a real problem was on the sunny days that we had the sunspots on the upper canopy, everything looked like a murrelet Nest, so we probably missed some as we were going and looking through that. But suffice it to say it didn't work out, and we've gone back to this more traditional approach, and so we can't use GPS tags like we thought we could.

It's typical of other birds and we can't use drones to kind of enhance things. We go to kind of an old school approach for finding nests in our, in this particular study.

[00:14:55] Lauren Grand: So you've been able to use some technology, but the bird just keeps to its name to still be elusive and not make it too easy for you.

[00:15:02] Dr. Jim Rivers: Yes. Yeah. Hey, this bird is designed by natural selection not to be found. So it's not surprising that we had trouble finding it.

[00:15:11] Lauren Grand: Yeah, it's doing its job for sure. So the way you described that is that you have people spread out along the coast. You've got planes flying up and down the coast trying to find these birds.

So that sort of tells me that maybe, you know, you said at the beginning or a little bit earlier that they, you had to have some idea of where their migration pattern was or where they were coming in off the coast. But it sounds like there might be some regularity to that, but it's not very consistent every year, each season because you have such a large scanning process.

Is that correct or, uh, do they seem to, you know, be in the same place regularly?

[00:15:45] Fieldwork and Tagging Techniques

[00:15:45] Dr. Jim Rivers: So, I didn't mention the first part of how we tag the birds, which ties in with your question. And that is that we left Newport, Oregon, which was in the center of our study area, and we would go out at night tracking the bird or looking for the birds and trying to capture them.

So we took a large research vessel out offloaded a small zodiac that was crammed with three guys who have about, by now they probably have 60 years of combined capture experience and that this is their specialty. They go out and they do a lot of captures of members of the A family. And so what they found was that murrelets were, were pretty consistent in terms of where they were.

But we were surprised in that they weren't all over the areas that we were searching, and there were certain hotspots right at the mouth of the Aquina River, for example, where we could always find birds. What we wanted to do is move up the coast and down the coast from there, within the range of the vessel, that would give us an opportunity to have more sites where the birds would go inland.

Ultimately, we did catch birds across that gradient, and we ended up tagging three hundred birds across five years of study. And interestingly enough though, most of the nests that we found were in the Siuslaw national forest, so that suggested that particular land ownership is good for murrelets because we know it has a lot of older forests in it.

And so those birds were relatively consistent in terms of where they nested and where we found them. But there was variation between years and in fact, the first year of the study in 2017, we tagged sixty-one birds, I think it was. And none of those birds went in to nests. And in fact, most of the birds. Went south of our study area into southern Oregon and California, and then a number of them went up into Washington and northern Oregon.

And that was a particularly surprising part of our study because we had assumed that if we captured birds off right off the Oregon coast, they were gonna stay there. And I think that's true when the ocean conditions are good. But in 2017, the year that I'm referring to, the ocean conditions were quite poor and they weren't great for nesting.

So the birds did not end up nesting. And then again, many of them moved out of our study area, presumably because they didn't have adequate food sources for themselves.

[00:17:50] Lauren Grand: Okay. So that's interesting.

[00:17:51] Impact of Ocean Conditions on Murrelet Behavior

[00:17:51] Lauren Grand: So though it sounds like the birds might be selective in choosing when they're gonna have a reproduction year based on how well the ocean's doing, can you talk about that a little bit more and how they sort of, how that interaction between the ocean and sort of forest ecosystems are relevant for the bird survival?

[00:18:09] Dr. Jim Rivers: So, so murrelets are, I think of them as birds of two worlds in that they're seabirds and I think we see them on the coast and we often think about them there. If we are in the terrestrial side of things, foresters, land managers, we think about them in their nesting habitats. And I think sometimes we forget that they require both of those areas to be in those habitats, to be in good shape.

And so murrelets are generalists in their foraging as adults, and they'll eat everything from invertebrates like krill. All the way up to large forged fish like Herman Anchovy. When they are provisioning their chick though, they have to bring in forage fish and they bring them in one at a time. There are some birds like puffins.

Some of the iconic photos of puffins are a bird with six or seven or maybe even more small fish in its bill. That's not what murrelets do. Murrelets catch one fish and they go all the way in and they deliver it to their chick, and they come back to the water to, to either replenish their. Fuel reserves or to get, catch another fish for their check and they don't regurgitate food like some birds do.

Some ocean birds like that, that carry food internally, they carry it externally and so it becomes very challenging for them when the conditions aren't good for forage fish because they're unable to raise their offspring. In 2017, when we started the project and when we had that year where we didn't have any bird's nest, we were coming off of the blob.

The blob was in 2014 to 2016. This was a reheat wave in the North Pacific. It led to huge die offs in Alaska and other parts. And so what we think happened in the Oregon coast is in 2017, there was still remnants of that effect. Some people call it the Hangover from the blob, which sounds like a movie title.

[00:19:49] Lauren Grand: It's a great movie title.

[00:19:50] Dr. Jim Rivers: Yeah. And so that those conditions kind of persisted into 2017 and weren't great. They got better in 2018, but were not kind of, uh, at the top of the list for what murrelets would be based on long-term data o off of the coast. So. So the point is really important, I think, to remember that murrelets need really good ocean conditions.

They need foraged fish that they can, rear their young on, but they also need healthy forests for them to have nesting sites and they need them in close proximity. So we have to be, if we think about murrelets commuting to the coast to get a fish and they're going 25 miles, that's just 25 miles to the coast, they may still have to fly up and down the coast to find those fish.

And then they've gotta bring them back and do that back and forth. So the further those forging and nesting areas are apart, the greater the energetic cost to the birds. And as you mentioned earlier, these, we think these are long lived birds. We don't have data per se, but we know that some other members of the Murrel family can live 15 or 20 years.

So that, or I should say the Auk family. So we think that murrelets are probably in that same time range, but they only have one egg, and so that means that reproduction is very slow, and if that nest fails, which nest failure is pretty high in general, including in our study that we don't have a lot of new offspring that are recruiting into the population in any given year.

[00:21:05] Conservation and Future Research

[00:21:05] Lauren Grand: Well, it sounds like you've been learning quite a bit from this study, but there's probably still a lot more to learn. What are some of the most key unanswered questions about the birds that you are looking forward to doing research on in the future?

[00:21:17] Dr. Jim Rivers: Yeah, so murrelets are, we mentioned that they're elusive and they're challenging to study, and despite our best efforts over five years, we ended up finding 37 nests, which,

it doesn't sound like a lot, but it's more than a doubling of the number of active nests in Oregon prior to our project. So in that sense, our project was really successful, but there are lots of things that are unanswered about murrelets at the current time. One of the things that we don't know is where do our birds go In the wintertime? We, the tags that we use only stay on for about three months, and our tagging, it takes place in May. So by Sep, late September or so when the birds are, birds are starting to molt their feathers off, they actually lose that tag over the wintertime, and so we don't know where they go. There has been data from British Columbia showing that at least a couple of birds have moved from British Columbia and moved all the way to the Ellucian Islands to head up there in late fall.

Whether they stayed there or not, we don't have information on that because the tags weren't transmitting after that period. We have at least some evidence of birds undertake long distance movements. We also don't have a good understanding of how often birds are moving between different conservation zones, and that becomes really important because I guess we haven't mentioned it out loud, but a lot of your listeners probably recognize that Murrelets are listed under the Endangered Species Act in California, in Oregon and Washington, and they have similar protections in British Columbia.

So one of the things about the population in the US that's listed is that we have different conservation zones where there are at-sea surveys conducted. It used to be conducted on an annual basis, but because of budget constraints, it's gone back to every other year and to every other conservation zone.

So there isn't kind of a full sweep of the whole year. We used to think that murrelets stayed pretty much in the conservation zone where they were at the start of the breeding season, but our tagging study showed that wasn't the case, that our birds were moving out of Oregon to California and north to Washington.

So one key thing to know is, is there similar movements of birds from California up into Oregon and Washington and from Washington birds south, and how much mixing is going on in the population? Because if there is a lot of mixing going on, we really need to be thinking about what those at-sea survey data tell us.

Because if we're assuming we're counting birds in a conservation zone and that's how many are there, that that could very well be true. But if they're moving back and forth, we're actually counting a mix of birds from different locations. So that's another piece. It's a really challenging piece to get at.

I think one of the best things that we can do is is to try and get those surveys going on an annual basis again. And there's certainly efforts in that regard to try and get funding to have annual surveys, but also to to have some sort of tag that would stay on the bird year round. So we could tell if a bird might be in Oregon for the summer, but then move into another part of its range in the wintertime and then maybe back to Oregon.

We did have at least one bird that was tagged in Oregon in 2017, went to Washington that year because of the ostensibly the lack of food resources and then came back to Oregon to breed in a separate year. So that suggests that there is some sort of faithfulness to Oregon when conditions are good, but we only had a, I think one bird out of 300 do that.

So trying to understand what the population norm is gonna be really critical going forward.

[00:24:33] Lauren Grand: How do you think that will inform us in the future? Would that be helpful to know more about, you know, those conservation areas for their nesting sites and how regular they need to be along the coast or what questions does that answer?

[00:24:47] Dr. Jim Rivers: Yeah, I think that's part of it, is trying to understand where we know a lot of the nesting hotspots from records, from a number of different studies. There's been large scale studies in Oregon, Washington, California, British Columbia now, but where the birds are in, in relation to those. Those hot, those nesting areas.

And then what are they doing in, in years when we don't have good ocean conditions? Are they moving? We don't think they're breeding in other areas, but what are they doing during that period, that downtime. And then one of the questions that we tried to answer with the movement data that we had was to what extent are murrelets using marine protected areas.

And it turns out that Oregon doesn't have a really large number of marine protected areas. And the murrelets that we tagged in those particular years, were not using a lot of those areas. So I think some of the work may be around figuring out hotspots for murrelet activity and potential ways that we may be able to mitigate some of the concerns around murrelet mortality, morbidity in ocean areas.

And so, one thing, if you think about it, I mentioned Yaquina the outlet of the Yaquina River in Newport is a big spot for the birds. That's also a huge spot for a lot of vessels coming and going, both commercial and recreational. So trying to figure out if there may be other areas that murrelets are also using and that if those might be areas that may have additional protections.

That's well beyond my area of expertise, but I think it's something that is worth considering given the importance of the marine environment for the birds on the other side. You know, one of the other areas that I didn't mention that that is worthy of additional research is understanding the relationship between murrelet nesting and edges.

We had a graduate student who just wrapped up a thesis this fall, and what he was finding is that murrelets don't seem to spend a lot of time in areas that have edges or they're, they're not having nests in areas with a lot of edge. But we also know that the coastal reach has a lot of fragmentation and a lot of edges from anthropogenic disturbances, harvests, homesteads, things like that.

So I'm trying to understand that relationship between predation and edge. And we have different types of edges that may be there, hard edge, where there's just a, you know, kind of a line between very young trees and very old trees, or whether different types of edges may lead to different outcomes from murrelet nesting that, that's a unanswered question.

We did our, the best that we could with our birds, but the way that we tagged them on the ocean and let them come inland meant that we weren't studied particular areas that did or did not have edges. So a more focused study could perhaps tease that apart.

[00:27:19] Lauren Grand: Yeah, that sounds really interesting. I think that would be a question that, you know, a lot of land managers would be interested in hearing about.

Well, I feel like I've learned quite a bit more about this bird today. Thank you so much for taking the time to share the research that your lab has been doing and talking about marbled murrelets we're about to wrap it up here.

[00:27:40] Lightning Round and Closing Remarks

[00:27:40] Lauren Grand: I'm gonna make you sit through our lightning round in just a minute, but just a reminder to our listeners that if you have any other questions that came up or we didn't cover a specific topic related to today's episode, drop us a comment or send us a message on our website so we can twist Jim's arm and have him come back and answer those questions.

You can do that at In the Woods podcast.com. Okay, Jim, here comes our lightning round. Are you ready?

[banjo music][ banjo music]

[00:28:12] Dr. Jim Rivers: I am ready.

[00:28:13] Lauren Grand: Okay. What is your favorite tree?

[00:28:14] Dr. Jim Rivers: My favorite tree I think is a sugar maple because I'm from New England and that is such an iconic tree and uh, provides us with maple syrup.

[00:28:24] Lauren Grand: Yeah, delicious. Do you have pancakes regularly that you can put that maple syrup

on?

[00:28:29] Dr. Jim Rivers: Pancakes, French toast and waffles are staples of our household, so yes.

[00:28:33] Lauren Grand: All right.

Delicious. Okay. What is the most interesting thing that you bring with you in the field, whether it's in a vest or field kit, or your truck? I guess or on your boat.

[00:28:43] Dr. Jim Rivers: I don't know if it's the most interesting thing, but certainly I think it's the most important and that is my camera, because when I'm in the field, there are lots of things that I find are useful for documentation, whether I'm doing research, going for a hike, I teach several classes at OSU, so having images that are real world images that come from our local area can be really useful for both giving presentations based on research that our lab does, but also to to talk to students about the forest around us.

[00:29:11] Lauren Grand: It's a great tool. I'm sure your students really appreciate it. It makes the talks more lively. Okay. And then lastly, do you have any resources that you can recommend for our listeners if they're interested in diving in a little bit deeper about marbled murrelet after today?

[00:29:25] Dr. Jim Rivers: I do. So several years ago when we were in the middle of our project, Oregon Field Guide came out with us and they did a, an episode on what it was like to study marbled murrelets and do marbled murrelet research.

And they came out in the woods with us and hiked into a couple of sites. And they also got out on the boat with us too, to see what that process was like. And it was a, they did an excellent job and it really captured the challenges and the intricacies of working with a species. So I think if your, if your listeners are interested in murrelets, that is a great episode to watch.

[00:30:01] Lauren Grand: Okay, amazing. We'll have the link to the episode on our website so you can check it out there along with information about Jim's favorite tree and some cameras. And I want to thank you again for being on the podcast with me today, Jim. Thank you. It was really a pleasure talking to you and learning about your research.

[00:30:19] Dr. Jim Rivers: Yeah, it's always fun to talk about murrelets.

[00:30:23] Lauren Grand: I learned so much today. Unlike most seabirds, murrelets, nest high in the mossy limbs of older trees, sometimes over 50 miles inland, making them so difficult to study. So we're so glad that Jim was able to share his information about how they tag the birds and how they nest, and how they track their movement so that we can learn a lot more about how to care for and maintain these birds on our landscapes.

That's all we have for you today. Thank you again for joining us in another episode of In the Woods. Join us in another couple weeks to learn more about Oregon's, amazing forests. Until then, what's in your woods? The In The Woods Podcast is produced by Lauren Grand, Jacob Putney, and Scott Leavengood, who are all members of the Oregon State University Forestry and Natural Resources Extension team.

Other members of the team who've been involved in the podcast include Carrie Berger, Jason O'Brien, and Stephen Fitzgerald. Episodes are edited and produced by Carrie Cantrell. Music for In the Woods was composed by Jeffrey Heino, and graphic design was created by Christina Friedhaus. Funding for In the Woods is provided by Oregon State University Forestry Natural Resources Extension, the Oregon Forest Resources Institute, and the USDA Renewable Resources Extension Act funding.

We hope you enjoyed the episode, and we can't wait to talk to you again next month. Until then, what's in your woods?