Stewards of the Earth. Just ask your Local Calvinist Cavalry

Alone in the nest, the starving seabird chick looked a little woozy. Then it collapsed.

Hours passed before the desperate mother bird returned, a fish tail sticking out of her beak. Again and again she offered the fresh morsel. But it was too late -- the baby bird was dying.

"It's an ugly, gut-wrenching thing to watch," said University of Washington researcher Julia Parrish, who witnessed such a scene repeatedly last summer, hidden amid the cacophony of 6,000 nesting murres on Tatoosh Island off the Olympic Peninsula.

The murres' unusual mass starvation became a clue in a mystery unfolding along the West Coast.

Weather, scientists know, is the key to the puzzle. For some reason, winds and currents crucial to the marine food web just didn't happen on schedule last year.

Seabird breeding failures in the summer were preceded by tens of thousands of birds washing up dead on beaches in Washington, Oregon and California.

And Washington's largest colony of glaucous-winged gulls also sputtered: Where 8,000 chicks normally fledge, 88 did last year.

"The whole process broke down," Parrish said. "We don't know what happened."
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