November 4, 2019 — The shipment arrived airfreight: 47 seabird carcasses collected by the Bering Strait villagers of Shishmaref.
Marine biologist Gay Sheffield drove to the airport on an August day to pick up the grisly cargo and bring it back to a laboratory just off the main street of this northwest Alaska town.
Inside a cardboard box, Sheffield found mostly shearwaters, slender birds with narrow wings — also kittiwakes, crested auklets, thick-billed murres, a cormorant and a horned puffin. Most were painfully skinny, bones protruding like knife-edged ridges.
“They starved to death,” Sheffield said. “Why?”
The birds should have been able to fatten on small fish, krill and other food that typically abound in the northern Bering Sea, a body of water so rich in marine life that gray whales, after they winter off Mexico, swim more than 5,000 miles north to feed here each summer.
But as climate change warms the die-offs of seabirds and marine mammals have been on the rise. The grim tally includes a nearly fivefold increase in ice-seal carcasses spotted on shore, strandings of emaciated gray whales, and near the St. Lawrence Island village of Savoonga, a discouraging spectacle: auklets abandoning seaside nests as their chicks succumb to hunger.