The Pigeon Guillemot Lady of Disco Bay
The Pigeon (Guillemot) Lady of Discovery Bay
OK, pigeon guillemots ain’t sexy. No elegant plumage, no exotic mating ritual, no operatic song. They’re middling-sized and unobtrusive, dressed in basic black, except for a patch of white on the wings and bright red feet that they rarely show off.
But what they lack in charisma, guillemots make up for in hometown loyalty and character. In the winter, while many of their feathered cousins wing off to greener pastures, our trusty guillemots stay right here, returning faithfully year after year to the same mates and the same nests, making their livings in local waters.
We see them patrolling in small groups near the shore, especially in Discovery Bay, around Admiralty Inlet or out along the strait. They’ll drift with seeming nonchalance until, as if alerted by sonar, each bird tips backward, lifts its wings slightly, then darts beneath the surface, leaving barely a ripple behind.
I’ve watched them for years, but most of what I know I learned just last month from Lee Robinson, who was featured speaker at a meeting of the local Admiralty Audubon Society. A trained wildlife biologist who now lives on Bainbridge Island, Robinson has been studying guillemots since her childhood on the beach at Diamond Point.
“They’re abundant and easy to study,” she explained. “And once you start working with them, you learn they have personality – those doe-brown eyes and marvelous red feet.”
Robinson grew up gazing across Discovery Bay at the seabirds and the hazy, dream-like profile of Protection Island, the federal wildlife refuge which is a strictly-protected nesting site for exotic puffins and rhinoceros auklets, as well as the more prosaic gulls and guillemots. Later, she adopted the Discovery Bay guillemots as a subject for her masters thesis, then worked as a federal biologist for some years before coming home to build her own nest.
Finally, in the early 1990s, Robinson gained access to Protection Island to begin her volunteer mission, gathering data from the region’s largest guillemot population for the state’s Puget Sound Ambient Monitoring Program.
Each summer, she resumes her work, driving up most weekends to her parents’ home at Diamond Point, launching a tiny fiberglass fishing boat from the beach for the quick run out to the island. Sometimes, she’s accompanied by her daughters, both of whom have “caught the birding bug,” she says. But often it’s just Robinson and her guillemots.
Over 13 summers of work, Robinson says she has captured, banded and released some 560 birds and recaptured about 25 percent of them – a very successful rate of recovery, she says. Along the way, she’s become, well, the pigeon guillemot lady of Discovery Bay.
Guillemots live and nest all around the sound and straits, but they’re especially abundant along the steep shores and driftwood beaches of Jefferson County. Usually, they nest in bluffs, but out at Protection Island they lay their eggs amid the driftwood on the long sand spit that extends eastward from the island cliffs.
That’s where Robinson works. Some time in April, she distributes 40 wooden boxes, custom-made for guillemots. In June, the birds take up residence and lay their eggs – usually two of the black-on-white speckled eggs slightly larger than chicken eggs.
Mostly, the birds nest directly on the ground, just above the high tideline, she says. But they’re very happy to get the boxes, which are built to discourage otters and other predators.
“One year, all but one of the boxes was occupied,” Robinson says. “A few years ago, I showed up late and the birds were waddling around, waiting for me.”
Males and females share egg-care duties, which provides Robinson opportunities to capture and mark birds – two bands per leg – for later data gathering.
The adults don’t like all that handling, she says. They use their long, narrow beaks to peck at her hands. She’s tried work gloves and bicycle gloves, but what works best is her grandmother’s old, white cotton “church gloves,” which hold up well to the pecking and pooping alike.
Most of her work goes on in daylight. But once in a while, Robinson comes out for an overnight, checking the boxes in darkness, sleeping in the crude research cabin at the foot of the bluff.
The first chicks hatch around July 1, hacking their way out of the shells and spilling out as tiny balls of black fluff weighing about an ounce “and way too cute,” Robinson says.
At this stage, the young can be held, weighed and studied – a task favored by Robinson’s daughters.
The parent birds immediately go to work, diving for small fish and bringing them back to the young. The chicks grow quickly, tripling their weight in a week, growing primary feathers and losing their down. In the fourth week, they set off from the nest, caked in their own excrement and tumbling down the beach to the water to begin swimming and fishing.
By September 1, most are gone – on their own. But many return year after year as adults to nest in Robinson’s boxes, testimony to good design.
Robinson’s mission is to track wildlife populations, and generally the guillemots seem to be doing well, she says. This year, the state estimates more than 16,000 adults living around Puget Sound – more than 2,000 of them nesting on Protection Island.
But populations fluctuate. Productivity – the rate of successful reproduction – dropped in 1998, which was an El Nino year. And a number of chicks died in 2003.
The birds face any number of risks, she says. Hot spells, especially in July, can be hard on newborns. Otters and eagles may feed on the young. And thousands of glaucous-winged gulls nest there, some of them just inches from the guillemots. Robinson’s teen-aged daughter, Karen, has begun studying that problem as a school project.
But those hearty pigeon guillemots persist, patrolling our local shores year-round, entertaining beachcombers and boaters, and providing good data and good news for at least one growing family of bird-lovin’ biologists.
