It’s a cruel summer for seabirds on Santa Barbara’s South Coast.
Food being pushed further away from shore, caused by a strong marine heat wave, are starving a variety of seabirds, including cormorants, common murres and brown pelicans, according to the California Department of Fish & Wildlife. Their deaths are unusually high this year compared to years prior.
And with the forecast of a super El Niño this year and increasing ocean temperatures due to climate change, it’s likely the trend will continue upward.
Ariana Kotovich, the executive director of the Santa Barbara Wildlife Care Network, said they started receiving an increase in reports of mass casualties of birds on local beaches a couple months ago.
“We always get calls throughout the year about seabirds,” Kotovich said. “But I think that’s when we took notice that things seemed to be getting unusual.”
When sick seabirds come into their care, Kotovich said, the ones that are starving are emaciated, dehydrated and hypothermic.
The Santa Barbara Wildlife Care Network, which treats sick and injured wildlife across the Central Coast, has treated 91 Brandt’s cormorants between January and now. This time last year, it saw fewer than 20.
They’ve also treated 157 common murres and 136 brown pelicans.
Sometimes, those injuries can be attributed to fishing hooks or oil seeps. And some of those reports have come in before the March timeline. But the numbers are still pretty high, Kotovich said.
Cold waters
An intense marine heat wave is pushing fish to deeper, colder waters — making it too far for seabirds to access.
Seabirds saw a successful reproductive year in 2025, but juvenile seabirds are less resilient to changes in the availability of food and not as experienced in catching prey, according to a report from Fish & Wildlife.
The marine heat wave also disrupts the base of the ocean’s food web. It does so by creating a barrier between nutrients and the organisms at the bottom, which trickles all the way up the chain, said Dan Robinette, a senior scientist at Point Blue Conservation Science.
A report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showed that waters along the West Coast were three to four degrees above its average temperature last September, which can also set the stage for something like last year’s harmful algal bloom.
But it may be difficult to see and comprehend just how conditions below the water’s surface have a direct impact on everything above it.
“The concept of marine climate is just not something that people think about,” Robinette said. “We understand climate on terrestrial—precipitation and temperature. But I think people don’t really look at the ocean and see changes in temperature and changes in nutrients and understand those dynamics.”
More dying seabirds
The super El Niño event, which pushes warm water toward the West Coast, will likely prolong this upward trend of dying seabirds.
“We have this marine heat wave that’s impacting us now, then we have an El Niño that is going to develop over the winter, potentially a super El Niño,” Robinette said. “So my understanding is, as this heat wave should be dissipating, we’re going to have now another source of warm water which is coming from the El Niño.”
The predicted super El Niño event makes the effects of warmer oceans more visible. But with climate change, which contributes to more intense marine heat waves, it won’t be as comprehensible. Its impacts will be felt over time and affect species differently.
“The one thing with climate change is that what we knew is not always playing out, like how we would predict anymore,” Robinette said. “It’s not just El Niños. It’s these marine heat waves.”
