Volunteers track dead birds as indicator of coast's health
Phuong Le, Associated Press
Updated 3:53 pm, Wednesday, November 8, 2017
OCEAN SHORES, Wash. (AP) — Barbara Patton scans the expansive beach on Washington's outer coast looking for telltale signs of dead seabirds: a feather sticking straight up, dark colors in the sand, unusual seaweed clumps that could mask a carcass.
Minutes into the nearly mile-long walk near her Ocean Shores home, she and her husband, Mike, encounter the first of three birds they'll find that morning.
Experience tells them it's a common murre. But the retired volunteers work through a protocol to identify the species: Eyes gone. Breast eaten. Feet pliable. They measure the wing, bill and other body parts, and photograph the bird, front and back.
All of that information is entered into a massive database kept by the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team, or COASST. The long-running citizen monitoring program at the University of Washington tracks dead seabirds as an indicator of the coastal environment's health.
More:
http://www.chron.com/news/science/article/Walking-beaches-volunteers-amass-data-on-dead-12340321.php
