Common Murre Restoration Program Educational Website

Proposer: Milena Viljoen
mviljoen AT bren.ucsb.edu

The Common Murre Restoration Project is a seabird restoration effort focused on several small islands off the coast of Northern California. Breeding colonies in the area held close to 3,000 murres as recently as the early 1980s, but was wiped out as a result of human-caused mortality, including an oil spill in the winter of 1986. After the spill, which killed over 6,000 murres, the Northern California colonies completely disappeared. The Restoration project spent almost ten years using decoys and other social attraction techniques to attract the birds back to the area to breed.
From 1996 to 2005, the project included an active environmental education program. Decoys, which were removed from the two islands each year after breeding season, were taken to schools to be cleaned and repainted by local students. The activities provided students with a way to become an active participant in the restoration program, while teaching them about the natural history of the area and the ecology of a local species of concern.
With the success of the project, however, decoys are no longer deployed and the education program is temporarily in recess. Project partners would like to establish an interactive website (targeted to teachers and students) to host some of the many educational materials they have on hand. The restoration program project used a variety of technologies to monitor the birds, and has an extensive collection of aerial photographs of the site, audio recordings of bird calls, and digital video of murre behavior and of restoration efforts that could all be used in conjunction with the site. I could also see setting up a blog for biologists to interact with teachers/kids as the monitoring continues.
Current website: http://www.fws.gov/sfbayrefuges/murre/murrehome.htm