On August 7, 1974, a tree surgeon named Hoyt Foster was rigging a climbing line high in a Douglas fir at Big Basin Redwoods State Park when he looked down into a mossy platform on a limb and saw a single fuzzy chick sitting in it, no nest built around it, just moss and a shallow scrape. He had, without particularly trying, just answered a question ornithologists had been asking since the marbled murrelet was first described in the 1700s.
Sailors and coastal naturalists had always known the bird itself, a small, dumpy seabird that dives for fish just offshore and comes in at dusk making a call people compared to a rusty gate. What nobody could do, for close to two centuries, was find where it nested.
The Search That Took 183 Years
Other seabirds nest on cliffs, on beaches, in open colonies. Marbled murrelets vanished inland at dawn and reappeared at dusk, and searchers spent nearly two centuries checking the obvious places, cliff ledges, rocky islets, open ground, and finding nothing. Foster's discovery explained why: murrelets don't nest on the ground at all. They fly inland, sometimes fifty miles from open water, and land on wide, moss-covered limbs deep in old-growth conifer canopy, a habitat requirement specific enough that a chick can hatch, grow, and fledge without its feet ever touching solid ground.
No Nest Is Built. One Is Found.
According to the National Park Service, confirmed marbled murrelet nesting in Redwood National Park occurs anywhere from two to thirty miles inland, in a season that runs from late March into mid-September. The nest itself is never built, just found: a limb wide enough and mossy enough to hold an egg without it rolling off, on a tree old enough that its upper branches have grown thick with moss and epiphytes, a condition that takes centuries, not decades, to develop.
One parent incubates the single egg for roughly 24 hours at a stretch, then swaps with its mate, who's been out at sea the whole time. The relieved bird flies straight to open water, sometimes covering the entire inland distance in under half an hour, feeds, and returns the following dawn. After about a month of incubation comes another month of the chick alone on the limb while both parents make dawn and dusk feeding flights, each one carrying a single fish back in its bill across all those miles of forest.
Plan Your Redwood Visit
Old-growth canopy like this runs along the Coastal Trail and through Redwood Creek. The trip planner can help you build a day around the groves murrelets actually nest in.
Open the Trip PlannerThe Population Tracks the Old Growth, Almost Exactly
Historical population estimates for marbled murrelets along the California, Oregon, and Washington coast run around 60,000 birds, a figure tied directly to how much old-growth forest once stood within flying range of the coast. Today the estimate across that same range sits near 4,000, give or take about 1,000, a decline driven overwhelmingly by the loss of that specific nesting habitat: you can't nest a bird that requires century-old moss platforms in a forest clear-cut two generations ago.
- First confirmed nest AUG 7, 1974
- Historical population ~60,000
- Current population ~4,000 ±1,000
- ESA status THREATENED SINCE 1992
The bird's population has kept falling even inside the parks and preserves where its nesting habitat is now protected, decades after old-growth logging in the region mostly stopped. Protecting the trees, it turns out, wasn't the whole fix. Redwood's own surveys show something like a 29 percent decline over roughly the past decade, inside a national park.
The Canopy Is Fine. The Ravens Are the Problem.
A raven that's learned to check a picnic area for dropped food is a raven flying the same forest a murrelet chick is sitting in, and a raven good at finding food is good at finding a moss-colored egg on a wide limb too. It's an odd kind of cause and effect for a park to manage: the trees are standing, the canopy is intact, and the bird is still losing ground because the same visitors who came to see old growth are, without meaning to, training its chicks' predators to search harder. Food storage rules and corvid-management programs in the park exist specifically because of this link, not as generic litter policy.
Facts and figures checked against the National Park Service's Redwood National and State Parks pages on the marbled murrelet, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Endangered Species Act listing record. NPS materials date the ESA listing to 1992; other conservation sources cite 1988 for earlier protective status action on the species, a discrepancy we haven't been able to fully reconcile, so we've used NPS's figure as the more directly authoritative one for this park's account. Hoyt Foster's name and the August 7, 1974 discovery date at Big Basin are documented consistently across NPS and academic sources.
Foster climbed down that day having found something two centuries of naturalists hadn't. The chick he found is long gone, one season, one limb, the way it goes for all of them. What's still up there, in the redwood and Douglas fir canopy from the coast to thirty miles inland, is the same mossy, centuries-old platform architecture that chick needed and that its species still needs, in a forest that's now mostly protected but still losing birds. The trees held up their end.