A Review of Thick-Billed Murre Banding in the Canadian Arctic, 1950–2010

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Banding of Thick-billed Murres Uria lomvia in the Canadian Arctic was initiated by L.M. Tuck in the 1950s, when he visited three of the largest breeding colonies in Canada. Up to 2010, banding had been carried out at eight of the 10 major breeding colonies, with totals of more than 1000 birds banded at Coburg Island and Cape Hay, Bylot Island, in the High Arctic and at Digges Sound and Coats Island in northern Hudson Bay. Because murres are long-lived birds, large-scale banding can continue to provide useful results for decades. A total of about 89 000 bandings in Arctic Canada resulted in 1757 usable recoveries up to 2010, the vast majority of which were birds killed by hunters in West Greenland or Newfoundland and Labrador. There was no apparent change in the large-scale geographical pattern of recoveries over the period reviewed, but the proportion of bands recovered has fallen. Several periods of higher-or lower-than-expected recoveries can be attributed to particular events: anomalous ice conditions, intensive gill-net fisheries, and oiling at sea. Thus, banding provided a useful tool not only for identifying migration and wintering areas, but also for identifying transient sources of increased mortality.

Quantifying the relative impact of hunting and oiling on Brünnich’s guillemots in the North-west Atlantic

“…In addition, we had no data on winter distribution of pre-breeding guillemots and therefore assumed that they behave like adult breeders. Nevertheless, the overall patterns accord well with all other information on guillemot winter distribution (e.g., ring recoveries; Bakken et al 2003;Lyngs 2003;Gaston & Robertson 2014), and we are confident that our main conclusions regarding impacts on specific breeding populations are robust. New tracking data not included here indicate that guillemots from Jan Mayen winter off south-west Greenland and north of Iceland (SEAPOP 2018), and that a few Icelandic birds winter on the Newfoundland Shelf (Linnebjerg et al 2018); including this information in the model would slightly change the predicted impacts of anthropogenic mortality.…”

Seabird diet changes in northern Hudson Bay, 1981-2013, reflect the availability of schooling prey

“…Our dataset differs from datasets derived from temperate systems in that (1) the coldto-warm shift can be clearly linked to a change in physical habitat (ice) and (2) some regime shifts appear to have occurred periodically for centuries, but the mid-1990s shift in Hudson Bay forms part of a general trend in Arctic sea ice cover, possibly associated with anthropogenic climate change (AMAP 2011) and therefore unlikely to be reversed. Our ability to detect the trends that we have described is greatly enhanced by the availability of a wide range of secondary prey at Coats Island, a situation that also exists at other low Arctic murre colonies in Canada (Gaston 1985).…”

Changes in trophic position affect rates of contaminant decline at two seabird colonies in the Canadian Arctic

“…Historically, Arctic cod dominated the diet of thick-billed murres (Uria lomvia) breeding in the Canadian high Arctic (Gaston and Bradstreet, 1993) and, until the mid-1990s, was the most common prey item found in the diet of nestling murres throughout the Canadian Arctic (Gaston, 1985;Gaston and Jones, 1998). During the 1990s, ice conditions changed in Hudson Bay causing a shift in the diet of thick-billed murres breeding in northern Hudson Bay from Arctic cod to primarily capelin (Mallotus villosus) (Gaston et al, 2003Provencher et al, 2012) which occupy a lower trophic position and have lower mercury concentrations than Arctic cod (Braune et al, 2014a).…”