Sentences with phrase «seabird eggs»

At Anacapa, introduced black rats preyed heavily on seabird eggs and chicks severely depleting populations of Scripps's murrelets.

As Arctic sea ice melts earlier each year, polar bears in some parts of Norway and Greenland are abandoning ice floes for dry land and their favorite meal — seals — for seabird eggs.

With Arctic sea ice melting earlier and earlier, polar bears are being forced to change their diets, scouring dry land for seabird eggs rather than enjoying their typical staple: seals.

As their hunting behavior shifts from ice to land, the polar bears «have progressively arrived earlier and earlier to have access to more eggs,» says biologist Børge Moe, another principal author of the study who works at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research in Kongsfjorden, where seabird egg predation is just beginning to increase.

Not exact matches

Then they got busy feasting on the eggs of the island's ground - nesting seabirds and multiplying, until the spot earned the name Rat Island.

Scientists conducting fieldwork in the region are reporting massive chick die - offs and nests with abandoned eggs, reports National Geographic's Winged Warnings series, which lays out the many threats facing the island's seabirds: warming oceans, earlier thaws, changing ocean chemistry and food webs, and increasing levels of ocean pollutants from PCBs to mercury.

And in both Alaska and California, low - level flights have startled nesting seabirds so much that they have knocked hundreds of eggs and chicks out of their nests, says a report released last week.

Worse still, many seabirds lay their eggs in burrows or cavities where they are protected from inclement weather and invisible for researchers.

On that same island in New Zealand, for instance, ecologists observed that, as rat numbers increased in the absence of cats, the population of seabirds whose eggs rats preyed upon declined.

The invasive rats decimated native seabird populations by eating eggs and chicks.

The National Park Service began poisoning black rats last year to prevent the rodents from feeding on the eggs of endangered seabirds.

Park officials had said they needed to get rid of the rats, which are not native to the islands, to protect several native species, particularly a small seabird called the Xantus» murrelet, whose eggs the rodents devour.

For more on the terrestrial foods topic, see my detailed discussion in this previous post, and this recent (March 30) ScienceNews report on yet another, largely anecdotal «polar bears resort to bird eggs because of declining sea ice» story (see photo below, based on a new paper by Prop and colleagues), which was also covered March 31 at the DailyMail («Polar bears are forced to raid seabird nests as Arctic sea ice melts — eating more than 200 eggs in two hours,» with lots of hand - wringing and sea ice hype but little mention of the fact that there are many more bears now than there were in the early 1970s around Svalbard or that the variable, cyclical, AMO (not global warming) has had the largest impact on sea ice conditions in the Barents Sea).

Some bad news for migrating seabirds: shrinking Arctic ice has left polar bears scrambling to find food, and they've taken to eggs in a big way.

A massive rat eradication effort took place in the 1990s and was successful — getting rid of the egg - eating pests brought back burrowing seabird numbers.