Not penguins—common murres. On sticks because these are decoys, carved out of wood or molded from plastic. Forlorn-looking because they’ve been out for months on a seastack called Devil’s Slide Rock, south of Pacifica, battered by wind, sun, and storms, on hardship duty in behalf of live murres.

They’re here to be spruced up so they can be put out on that rock again as lures to entice living murres to settle among them, nest, and raise chicks. Mr. Greathouse’s students are participating in the project: they, together with students from nine other schools—782 youngsters in all—are an army of sprucer-uppers. Outfitted with paintbrushes and small containers of dark brown paint (for the back and head) and white paint (for the breast), they are working to help scientists restore a colony of these seabirds that was wiped out by an oil spill in 1986.

Before they exercise their painting skills, though, they learn about these personable little birds. Peluso had visited the school a couple of weeks earlier and presented a slide show about murres, dive-pursuit predators about a foot and a half long. The students then got a practical lesson in seabird adaptations by means of a dress-up game: a coffee filter on the head to represent the bird’s salt gland, for example, and swim fins for the webbed feet that help it traverse the open sea.

Today, they are going to do a relay race that will teach them about countershading and seabird feeding grounds. First, Peluso asks: “Who can tell me an adapation that murres have?”

Hands shoot up.

“Down feathers!”

“That’s right. And what are down feathers used for?”

“They help the birds stay warm and dry and help them float!”

“Right. What else?”

“Their eggs are pointed on one end!”

“Yes. And why is that a good thing?”

“Because then the egg doesn’t roll off the cliff!”

And so they go, picking apart some of the characteristics of birds in general, and of common murres in particular: oil glands, contour feathers, beaks, and of course, guano. The children’s recall of what they learned two weeks earlier is phenomenal: they know things about birds that even an accomplished birder might struggle to point out.

Then the fun begins with the relay race, in which the students, divided up into three “murre colonies,” vie to see who can get the most fish. When they’ve finished, Peluso tells them to look closely at their catch and notice that some fish are white and some black. “How come?” she asks. “Think about what the birds would see if they were in the water looking back up at the surface. Would a fish be better or worse off if it were light-colored underneath?” This leads to a discussion of countershading and a refresher on the murres’ own coloration.

And then comes the messy-fun part of the morning as the children file into the room and, in pairs, claim birds to paint. In a matter of minutes, the decoys are transformed from sorry-looking almost-penguins into proud brown-and-white Uria aalge. “Use long strokes,” Peluso instructs. “And do not dip your brush in your neighbor’s paint!”

“Do the murres really get fooled?” asks one boy.

“They sure do,” Peluso replies.

Indeed, any murre looking for a colony to cozy up in would be a bit daft to shun these now handsome specimens.

Oiled Birds and Dapper Decoys

The overwhelming success of the Common Murre Project took even its developers by surprise. “We thought we would get a few birds to come in and check out the decoys and hang out the first year, but within 48 hours of putting the decoys up—and mind you, the colony had been empty for ten years—we had birds on the rock, and in that year we got breeding by six pairs, and three fledglings,” according to Gerry McChesney, lead biologist on the project. “It blew everybody away.” Since that first year of 1996, the goal of establishing 100 nesting pairs by the end of the ten-year project has long been surpassed. Already by 2000 the experiment had lured 98 nesting pairs; in 2001, 115 pairs set up house; and this year the number was up to 123.

Yet these numbers are but a start to full restoration of the Devil’s Slide colony, which in the early 1980s was a raucous, bustling mob of some 3,000 birds (a number that itself represents a significant population decline due to the widespread use of gill nets for halibut in the 1970s, which drowned tens of thousands of murres). Then in February 1986 the Apex Houston, an oil barge en route from San Francisco to Long Beach Harbor, accidentally discharged some 26,000 gallons of San Joaquin Valley crude oil, which coated beaches from Point Reyes to Monterey. Of 9,900 birds killed, 6,300 were murres. The Devil’s Slide colony was history.

In 1988 federal and state natural resources trustees commenced litigation against Apex Houston Company under the Clean Water Act and the National Marine Sanctuaries Act. The case was settled six years later under a consent decree, for a total of $6.4 million, of which most—$4.9 million—was allocated for natural resource damages. A trustee council, made up of representatives from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), and California Department of Fish and Game, was established to review, select, and oversee implementation of restoration actions for natural resources injured by the spill. The San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge Complex, under the jurisdiction of the USFWS, was brought in to lead the project; as overseer of the Farallon Islands, it had already done considerable work documenting declines of murres, and the infrastructure for undertaking the fairly ambitious murre project was already in place.

The decision to implement a “social attraction” plan on Devil’s Slide Rock came easily. Since 1977, Project Puffin had been using decoys with great success to lure puffins in to suitable nesting habitat off the coast of Maine. Steve Kress, who works for the National Audubon Society on Project Puffin, was hired as a consultant on the Common Murre Project; he also served as a star witness in developing the Apex Houston settlement plan. Everyone agreed that decoys—lots and lots of them—were the key to luring murres back to their old home. And so Mad River Decoy, then of Waitsfield, Vermont, was enlisted to work magic and create a still-life murre colony.

In January 1996, the first decoys were deployed on Devil’s Slide Rock, representing 385 adults, 36 chicks, and 48 eggs. It took two days and eight to 10 people—biologists on the project and a few volunteers and interns—to do the work. A solar-powered sound system was set up to play CD recordings of a real murre colony—“important for sucking the birds in,” said McChesney—and mirrors helped give the feeling of spaciousness and movement. Within 24 hours, one murre was seen visiting the rock, and within 48 hours four birds had arrived and settled in. Since that time, the egg and chick decoys have been phased out, and as the number of living, breathing birds has increased, even the adult decoys have become less numerous: in 2002, only 176 were deployed. Meanwhile, a few months later, 102 eggs hatched and 95 chicks fledged—a healthy survival rate for the 123 breeding pairs.

Now that the goal of 100 breeding pairs has been reached, said McChesney, “we don’t want to just take everything off. Murres by nature nest in dense clumps: it’s an antipredator behavior. One murre against a gull or raven doesn’t stand a chance, but several do.” The new goal of the project, therefore, is “to start getting the murres to move in closer and closer together, to somehow design the decoy plots toward densification of the birds that are actually there so they’ll be self-sufficient.” This will take up the last five years of the project (which has been extended by two years). In addition, decoy work on San Pedro Rock, just south of Pacifica—a tougher problem (see sidebar)—began three years ago, so the participating biologists’ attention will turn increasingly to that aspect of the project.

Youthful Collaboration

Schoolchildren were involved in the Common Murre Project right from the start, in part to ease the job of refurbishing hundreds of guano-encrusted decoys, but even more, to interest the children in the marine environment. “More classes get added every year, and all the teachers seem to want it back every year,” McChesney remarked. All but two of the 10 participating schools are in Pacifica, Half Moon Bay, and Montara. “These are kids that ride by the rock and can relate to it. They have their take-home messages, and they really share them with their families.”

“It’s an amazing opportunity for kids in this age group to be involved with reestablishing wildlife in nature,” said science teacher Greathouse. “Some kids get really inspired. Starting early, it’s an experience to build on.”

The value of the children’s input cannot be underestimated. “Let’s face it,” said McChesney, “if we’re going to clean up the marine environment, it will take education. This isn’t just about research. It’s about putting something back that we took away.”