Each chicken egg was painstakingly colored (Benjamin Moore Oceanfront 660) and speckled to resemble murrelet eggs. A control batch of red speckled eggs also decorated the forest.

But this egg is a bait and switch: It's not a murrelet egg at all, but a trick egg that Halbert made from a small chicken egg. "We paint them to look like marbled murrelet eggs," she says.

The culprit: the egg-sucking, chick-eating Steller's jay. A young marbled murrelet chick. USGS. About 4,000 murrelets remain in California, with about 300 to 600 in central California's Santa Cruz ...

The murrelets number about 10,000 in the world and about 3,000 in California, with only about 100 to 200 pairs on Anacapa Island. They are particularly vulnerable because they nest in the same ...

Marbled murrelets lay their eggs on mossy beds among the broad upper limbs of old-growth conifers. But they are not alone in their preference for tall, ancient trees in North America’s coastal ...

As part of that noise study, the team set up cameras near the nests. It confirmed that noise could bother the birds, so the park started scheduling trail maintenance outside the nesting season. The ...

On the Pacific Northwest Coast, rocky beaches blend into dense old growth forests shadowed in a thick misty veil. Here lives one of the most enigmatic seabirds of this region, ...

On the Pacific Northwest Coast, rocky beaches blend into dense old growth forests shadowed in a thick misty veil. Here lives one of the most enigmatic seabirds of this region, whose breeding ...

The birds typically lay their single egg high in a tree on a horizontal limb at least 4 inches in diameter. Steller’s jays, crows and ravens are the main predators of murrelet nests.

A psychological warfare program centered on vomit could help save the marbled murrelet, an endangered seabird that nests in California's old-growth redwood forests. The robin-sized murrelet lives ...