ZECO TRAVEL TALK

In a Seattle Times story—August 17, 2007—writer Craig Welch reported a fascinating sequence of events that spans 7,000 miles and two hemisphere, a sooty shearwater chick, a fish, and an electronic monitoring device… and the research scientist who was the catalyst for the story. We thought you’d enjoy a brief recap of a mystery with an amazing answer:

When Dale Whaitiri, a bird researcher, pulled a tiny monitoring tag from a dead baby sooty shearwater on an island off Southern New Zealand, he wanted to know where it came from and how it got there. That bird was about to be the dinner of local Maori tribesmen who “catch the delicious chicks for supper, but hand over the stomachs to Whaitiri and other researchers who monitor the birds’ diets.”

Some scientific sleuthing revealed that the tag was three years old and originated in a steelhead that was being monitored after it was released into Columbia River. Since steelhead migrate north, it was determined that a sooty shearwater must have been the carrier. These hardy seabirds fly thousands of miles to nest in warm weather and they are often seen in great numbers at the mouth of the Columbia feeding on steelhead as they make their way into the Pacific. The birds favor nesting spots in Japan and New Zealand and lay eggs in underground burrows.

Welsh reports that Jen Zamon, a seabird expert for the Northwest Fisheries Science Center feels the answer to the mystery then “…may be elementary. A sooty shearwater ate the steelhead on the Columbia, carried the indigestible glass tag in its belly for two years, then regurgitated it into the baby’s eager maw.”

The greater mystery, according to Welsh, ends up being: “How did the tag wind up in a fat, flightless bird about to be eaten by Maori tribesmen? And of the millions of …sooty shearwaters—called “titi” by the Maoris—how did Whaitiri manage to poke this one’s belly?”

“The odds are almost impossible to fathom,” said Zamon.

To read the story in its entirety: seattletimes.com