Ancient Murrelet _(Synthliboramphus antiquus)_
Chase Littlejohn (Bendire 1895) spent the spring and summer of 1894 collecting eggs on islands south of the Alaska Peninsula. He has left us a detailed record of what he saw but not where he saw it. Bent (1963) stated flatly that the site of his collecting was Sanak Island and this has common acceptance. Several things in his account point to a site which was a small island with several peers close by, but this could not have been Sanak. It could have been an island in the Sanak Island group or it could equally well have been somewhere in the Sandman Reefs. Unfortunately, because of this the record is clouded. There has never been anything approaching a survey of the southern half of the Sandman Reefs. We do not know what breeding colonies are there.
At any rate, Littlejohn told of the large numbers of Leach's storm-petrels, fork-tailed storm-petrels, auklets (of which only Cassin's is specifically identified), and ancient murrelets which occupied a large number of small islands. He could not calculate the number of breeding murrelets on his small island, the size of which I interpret to have been of the same order of magnitude as two others which he estimated were about 2 acres. He does say that the murrelets must have numbered several thousand and could, if left alone by the Aleuts, have quickly grown too numerous for the island to accommodate.
Murie (1959) made a brief visit to Sanak in 1937 and learned that there were no longer any large colonies of seabirds. He attributes this to exploitation of the fisheries and to the fox-farming industry. Littlejohn told of the repeated visits of Aleuts to his small islands, where they took hundreds of birds each time and all of the eggs they could find. This kind of activity could not help but disrupt the breeding on these islands.
Littlejohn's description of the ancient murrelet's nest leaves little doubt that the birds could be reached by fox or rats with ease. The birds showed no particular care in selecting a nest site and often worked their way back no more than about a meter into the dead vegetative cover from preceding years, where they scratched out a shallow nest.
There are few records of the ancient murrelet from the northern and western Gulf of Alaska. Friedmann (1935) reported the collection of a series of eggs in 1884 on Kodiak Island. Chase Littlejohn (Bendire 1895) collected eggs from somewhere in the Sanak Group in 1894. In 1908 Dixon (Grinnell 1910) saw a bird in Port Nellie Juan. Several were seen by Jaques (1930) near Belkofski in May 1928. Gabrielson collected one bird at Cordova in September 1941 and another at the Chiswell Islands in July 1945 (Gabrielson and Lincoln 1959). He saw numerous flocks in the Gulf of Alaska on 30 July of an unnamed year. In 1943, he would have been near Cape Spencer on that date. In 1945 he would have been near the Chiswell Islands. In either case, he was probably somewhere in Blying Sound.