SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
The meteorological world is abuzz about an expected El Nino - a period of warmer global weather fueled by heat from the Pacific Ocean. But for months, much of the Pacific has already been hotter than normal. And as NPR's Nate Rott reports, the effects of that heat can be seen on the California coast.
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NATE ROTT, BYLINE: It's a normal enough day on the beach in La Jolla. Surfers are in the water. Families are getting pictures taken in matching blue. And Tammy Russell is looking for birds.
TAMMY RUSSELL: Oh, this is a loon, a common loon.
ROTT: Russell is a marine ornithologist - a seabird expert - at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.
RUSSELL: You want to look through the binoculars?
ROTT: Sure.
RUSSELL: You can see its huge bill going to the right.
ROTT: Oh, yeah.
It's black and sharp, shaped like a dagger.
RUSSELL: No other bird has a bill like that.
ROTT: The bird is also dead.
RUSSELL: This one's been here a while.
ROTT: The first week of every month, Russell and teams of mostly volunteers walk California beaches to catalog what's washing up on shore. It's basically the grimmest type of birding you can imagine.
RUSSELL: This is either a Clark's or a western grebe. It's hard to tell without the feathers.
ROTT: The goal of the program is to monitor coastal health, using seabirds as a window into what's happening offshore.
RUSSELL: They're the most visible member of the marine food web, and so they're telling us a lot about what's happening out there.
ROTT: And for months, they've been telling us something is off. In about a quarter-mile of searching on this day, she finds 19 dead birds. Further south in Imperial Beach, Russell says volunteers recently found 37.
RUSSELL: It's unlike anything I've ever seen, where I've been on the beach and seen cormorants - like, I tear up 'cause it's just - it's so horrifying. They just come to shore, walk to the beach and die. And I've never seen that before.
ROTT: It started over the winter, Russell says - birds washing up emaciated, starving. The spike coincided with another anomaly that scientists were noticing on the Scripps Pier, where ocean temperatures are taken daily, the same way they have been for more than a century...
Good shoulder workout.
MELISSA CARTER: Yeah, right? Popeye arm.
ROTT: ...By turning a handle to lower a bucket off the end of the pier into the water below.
CARTER: You can't be afraid of water here. Getting you a little wet. Then we would measure the temperature.
ROTT: Melissa Carter is an oceanographer at Scripps, where she spearheads a program that collects temperature data up and down the California coast. And she says that data shows...
CARTER: Over the last few months, our temperatures have been 3 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than average.
ROTT: Since the start of the year, 38 daily temperature records have been broken here.
CARTER: This is the warmest continuous period that we've seen at Scripps.
ROTT: And prolonged heat can wreak havoc on ecosystems in multiple ways. It causes weaker upwelling from the cold depths of the ocean, which means fewer nutrients near the surface. Meanwhile, animals that the birds like to eat move.
JULIA PARRISH: They go deep 'cause the deeper you go, the colder it is.
ROTT: This is Julia Parrish, a marine ecologist at the University of Washington.
PARRISH: So the little fish are going deep and the krill, we think, are going deep. And that means that as a seabird, you have to work harder to get them, right?
ROTT: Meaning it's harder to get all the calories they need to survive. From 2014 to 2018, a marine heat wave that scientists dubbed the Blob caused mass die-offs of marine mammals and millions of birds in the Pacific. It closed fisheries and drove whales closer to shore. Parrish says this current heat wave is different. It doesn't stretch up into Washington and Alaska. But the broader concern for her and Russell back on the beach is that as the global climate warms...
RUSSELL: These heat waves, they've not only been happening more often, but they're lasting longer and more severe. So it's not giving time for these birds, like, recover after these events.
ROTT: And with more warming from a likely El Nino just around the corner, that deadly pattern is set to repeat. Nate Rott, NPR News, La Jolla, California. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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