Imagine if you will an ocean sound far from these High Plains — a clear high “keer keer” from a bird in a fog-bound watery world. This is the cry of the Marbled Murrelet, also called the Fog Lark or Fog Bird, and their cry is heard continuously as they float on the open sea.
     Marbled Murrelets live in the ocean off the west coast of North America, from Baja California to the tip of the Aleutian Islands. Nicknamed Fog Larks by the Eskimos, Marbled Murrelets were sighted in 1778 by the men of Captain James Cook.
     Marbled Murrelets spend most of their lives at sea, gathering together in small agile flocks, calling to each other as they fish.
     I learned about these chunky little seabirds from Maria Mudd Ruth — her book, Rare Bird, tells how the Marbled Murrelets captured her imagination and changed her life. I recommend the tale to anyone fond of nature, history, and mystery — all three come into play with this curious bird.
     A Marbled Murrelet is nothing much to look at — a 10-inch black and white or brownish bird with webbed feet, a short neck, and a stumpy tail. Sexes are alike: dark on top, white underneath, except in breeding season when they both turn marbled brown all over. You might turn the page in a bird book unless you know what makes these birds unique.
     They nest not on the shore or some rocky cliff, but deep in the inland old growth forest, up on some mossy limb one hundred feet or more above the forest floor.
     These lofty nests are inland as far as 45 miles — an odd location for a bird that eats only ocean fish. Nevertheless, into a mossy nest in the tallest trees on our continent, a breeding pair of web-footed Murrelets produces one egg. Both parents incubate, swapping 24-hour shifts at dawn. Once the egg hatches, the young bird must be fed, so the parents take turns flying those 40-some-odd miles to the ocean and back.
     Fog Lark take-offs are compared to bullets fired from a gun. Once in flight, they’ve been clocked at 100 miles an hour, with an average cruising speed of 55.
     A parent Murrelet returns to the nest with a small fish held crosswise in the beak. This is handed to the hatchling, who must wrangle it from crosswise to lengthwise before swallowing it head-first in one gulp.
     If not for those tell-tale calls drifting down from the treetops, Marbled Murrelet movement over land would be nearly undetectable. This may explain why it took so long to discover where the Fog Lark actually nested, a mystery until only a few years ago.
     In the late 1970s, several Marbled Murrelet nests were finally verified, proving this ethereal web-footed seabird does indeed nest in trees like the Coastal Redwood and the Douglas Fir.
     We might have heard more about the Marbled Murrelet if it hadn’t been for another notorious bird, the Spotted Owl. Both birds are threatened by old-growth logging, but the spotlight seems fixed on the owl.
     The Fog Lark is threatened by humankind on every side, as vulnerable to oil-slicks and gill-nets on the ocean as to logging in the old growth forest. In Rare Bird, Maria Ruth urges us to value this remarkable bird, and to heed the warning implied by the plight of the Marbled Murrelet.
     Rare Bird is by Maria Mudd Ruth, published by Rodale, Inc.