Beached Birds

I know the photo is pretty gross, but I spent part of my day yesterday seeing to lots of beached birds. Not sure what the cause is yet, but it's pretty gruesome. We had hundreds of beached birds here. I belong to an organiztion called COASST. The Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team does a lot here on the shoreline. We survey for dead birds and send the data off to the University of Washington to be analyzed to see what the cause might be. We got two organiztion involved yesterday, because we had dead birds and live birds. So the North Coast Wildlife Rescue Center of Oregon got their volunteers together and collected about 40 birds they thought could be re-habed. Today someone is coming down from the UW and we are going to go out and see how many dead birds are on the beach after the tide came in and out. We will count, identify, measure, take feather samples, location data and walk for quite a while on the beach. Oh yes, and of course it will be raining most of the day. There is a 90% chance of rain all day. Most of the birds were Common Murres and Pacific Loons. Beautiful birds, but not when they are in this state. Makes me really sad. I started to post a photo of another one that showed location, measurements and other data that I did, but it was pretty gross. It had started to be chewed on by the local gulls. So I'll leave that out. It's pretty interesting to be doing this kind of volunteer work.