| Waterbirds in the Pacific Norwest Coast of North America have faced numerous challenges in recent decades, including oil spills, loss of habitat, and warmer sea temperatures. Significant changes in both the population sizes and distributions of many species have occurred. In response, wildlife managers have cited the need to protect these species and restore them to "historic population levels." However, these birds were affected by human hunting and natural events long before the arrival of Europeans. The goal of this analysis is to assess how natural processes such as climatic change, earthquakes and sea-level rise, as well as human hunting, have affected birds along the Pacific Northwest Coast in the deeper past. Such knowledge is essential if we are to be able to predict their responses to similar events in the future, such as global warming.; To address this goal, I analyzed bird remains from three archaeological sites dating to the late Holocene: Watmough Bay (45-SJ-280), Minard (45-GH-15), and Umpqua/Eden (35-DO-83). I have identified significant changes through time in the first two bird assemblages, while the taxa present at the Umpqua/Eden remained relatively stable through time. At the Watmough Bay site, there is a shift from the dominance of juvenile cormorants to diving ducks between ca. AD 300-700. It is probable that cormorants moved their nesting colonies farther away from Watmough Bay in response to repeated human hunting, and the people living at the site switched instead to hunting sea ducks, possibly using submerged netting technology. The most visible change in the Minard assemblage is the shift from Sooty Shearwater remains to those of Cassin's Auklets and Common Murres between AD 1100 and AD 1400. Two potential hypotheses explain this change: an increase in sea surface temperatures or a decrease in Sooty Shearwater abundance due to human hunting ("muttonbirding") in their New Zealand breeding grounds.; This study documents the quality of the biogeographic and archaeological information that resides in avian assemblages from the Northwest Coast archaeological sites and demonstrates how much can be learned by analyzing those assemblages in detail. |
