Fishing Vessel Endangered by Crested Auklet Landings

During the night of 16 January 1977, a spectacular wreck of Crested Auklets (Aethia crist~tdl~) OCcurred aboard the F/V Lyndz in Kupreonof Strait between Raspberry and Kodiak islands, Alaska.We interviewed crew members and collected auklets from aboard the 86-foot long crab-fishing vessel in Kodiak on 18 January 1977.M. Poirier, crew member, related that "We were passing through Kupreonof Strait on our way to Kodiak from Shelikof Strait.We had our bright fishing lights on, as well as our running lights.When I was on watch, between 20:00 and 21:00, I began seeing flocks of birds sweeping back and forth across the strait, low to the water.-About two miles NW of Bare Island (57"59' N. 153"08' W) the birds began to strike the boat in large numbers.When they got close to the boat, they became confused and flew toward the running lights, three of which they broke.The birds did not hit the powerful fishing lights on the mast because they were not flying that high.Thousands of them sat on the water around the boat, and at times the flocks in the air were so dense that they blocked vision from the pilot-house ports.After a half hour or so, birds had accumulated to the top of the bulwarks in the side passageways to at least three feet deep, and were one foot deep on parts of the back deck.The birds blocked the scuppers; the deck did not drain, and the boat listed.The skipper, worried that the boat might swamp, sent the crew of three onto the deck to get rid of the birds.We threw shovelfuls and armloads of birds off the boat for an hour and a half.When we finallv realized that the outside lights attracted the birds, we turned them off, and this decreased the number which landed aboard.By the time we reached Chernof Point, we were out of the concentration, though we could still see scattered flocks.We anchored for the night in Whale Passage, where several hundred more birds flew aboard before morning."T. Richardson stated that "In Kupreonof Strait the wind was blowing 35 to 40 knots from the NE, but the seas were not too rough.The winds and seas were much worse in Marmot Bay, and had we entered it with plugged scuppers, we would have been in danger.The skipper, M. Lynch, who has fished many years in Alaska, says he has never seen a concentration of birds as dense."When we visited the F/V Lyndu in Kodiak Harbor on 18 January, there were still approximately 200 live Crested Auklets underneath a raised plywood platform on the back deck.Another 15 dead birds were found wedged under pipe or caught in the scuppers.A few auklets came out from under the deck every