Alaska’s population of common murres took a big hit in 1989 from the Exxon Valdez oil spill. It is estimated that the spill killed 250,000 birds, and most were common murres. The common murre ...

It would take years of study to confirm they had witnessed the largest die-off of any bird species ... across two large marine ecosystems in the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska.

But in 2015 and 2016, officials tallied 62,000 emaciated corpses from California to Alaska. Since then, scientists have been piecing together what happened to the birds, along with other species ...