The marbled murrelet can 'fly' underwater in pursuit offish. It is web-footed, about the same size as a pigeon. It is the only member of the auk species to nest in trees. Because this species breeds in old growth forests, there has been a substantial drop in populations due to logging.

Nine years after Paul Harris Jones and three other naturalists found the first active nest of this small, chubby and threatened seabird in 1990, Victoria was convinced by local activists and environmentalists to create Spipiyus Park, a new Class A Provincial Park on the Sechelt Peninsula.

It was a partial victory to save the bird. In his self-illustrated volume, Marbled Murrelets of the Caren Range and Middlepoint Bight (Western Canada Wilderness Committee $34.95), Jones describes how and why the sanctuary was established in part of the Caren Range, Canada's oldest forest. He remains wary.

After Jones' discovery, forest industry and SFU researchers found "60 or 70" murrelet nests. "The forest industry was hoping like hell they would find a nest in a non-commercial tree or a cliff," he says. "We think a lot of birds have died due to the stress levels the birds suffered when they were tagged. They applied a suture through the skin of the bird's back. They would literally chase them with helicopters."

Jones and his wife Mavis are co-founding members of Friends of Caren. Mavis Cramb Jones has concurrently published Her Festival Clothes (McGill-Queens $16.95), her first book of poetry, in the Hugh Maclennan Poetry Series. Together the Joneses wrote and published an earlier book on the murrelet, in the early 1990s. The murrelets were first noted in print at the time of Cook's last expedition to the Pacific Northwest in 1778. The Joneses first encountered the marbled murrelets in the late 1960s when fishing in a dinghy off Middlepoint Bight where they had a summer home.

"Spipiyus is the name the native people of Sunshine Coast have given to this bird," says Paul Jones. "The Tsimsians used this species as a votive headpiece because it had special significance as a bird which knew the mysteries of the deep and communed with the unseen spirits of the unseen world beneath the sea."

Murrelet 1-1895123-13-5; Clorhe, 0-7735-1909-2

[BCBW Spring 2002]