The common murre may only weigh a kilogram, but researchers at Memorial University consider it to be comparable to an Olympic athlete. They are watching the species carefully, in particular to see what they can learn about the impacts of climate change.

Dr. Bill Montevecchi of the Department of Psychology has been studying the behaviour of seabirds for more than 30 years. In that time, technology has made major changes to the kinds of information he and his graduate students can now track.

“We have always worked on seabird islands where we could get really close to the birds and watch them, weigh them, measure them, measure their chicks, get fish from them and figure out what they were eating,” said Dr. Montevecchi. “Yet we never knew where they got the fish even though we had people working on fishing boats and DFO vessels that could see the birds at sea.”

In 1999 everything changed. That’s when Dr. Montevecchi and his team started using small light-weight bird-borne devices with which they could track birds at sea and measure their behaviour. Since then their research has been able to go in completely new directions.

“Now we can ask what individual free-ranging birds do at sea, what kinds of decisions they make, where they go and how they are affected by changes in water temperature, fish distributions and ocean climate in general,” said Dr. Montevecchi. “These devices allow us to now interrogate free-ranging seabirds in ways that were not previously possible. The advances in micro-technology devices have actually generated a paradigm shift in our seabird research program.”

Paul Regular, one of Dr. Montevecchi's grad students in the Cognitive and Behavioural Ecology Program (CABE) and Dr. April Hedd, a teaching post doctoral fellow in the Psychology Department, studied murres on Gull Island in Witless Bay for much of last summer. Mr. Regular says the insight gathered from these devices was nothing short of incredible, particularly the lengths to which the birds would go to find food.

“The birds we are studying on Funk Island fly 60 kilometres, dive to a maximum of 150 metres for up to three minutes to find fish,” said Mr. Regular. “They feed themselves, get some for their chicks and then fly back 60 kilometres – and they do that twice each day!”

According to Dr. Montevecchi, of birds that fly, the common murre is the deepest diving bird. They are the heaviest birds that can fly in the air and under water and look similar to a small penguin. In recent years, their studies of the birds' eating patterns have shown some clear indicators of the impacts of climate change.

"Cold blooded animals like capelin, which murres feed on, are going to be pushed around if the Labrador Current gets warmer or shifts offshore or inshore,” said Dr. Montevecchi. “If the ocean temperature changes, those fish could be in very different places horizontally or at deeper depths. The birds that eat them will have to solve that problem. For these seabirds there isn't breakfast, lunch or dinner - there's just satiation or hunger depending on whether or not they have the physical and mental abilities to find and catch fish.”

Dr. Montevecchi says such changes in seabird activities and diets have already begun to appear.

“The murres are now often diving over 100 meters to get capelin, whereas before they might seasonally get them inshore by diving down 10 or 20 metres,” he said. “The seabirds and our ever-increasing capabilities to track them and record their behaviour at sea are providing a real-time assessment of what is actually happening in the ocean. They have to find fish. If they don't get it right, if they don't eat for three or four days, they die. Mother Nature doesn’t take any prisoners.”