By Edie Lau
Bee Staff Writer
Published May 11, 1998

This time of year, sea birds that look somewhat like penguins are busy breeding on the Farallon Islands. Within a month after mating, these birds -- called common murres -- will lay speckled eggs, one per couple. The eggs are a gorgeous mixture of hues, and big.

The eggs also are said to taste good.

The Gold Rush-era demand for the eggs of the sea bird known as the common murre nearly killed off the birds on the Farallon Islands. Special to The Bee: Catherine Sydeman

People who poured into Northern California for the Gold Rush ate millions of murre eggs that were collected from the Farallons, pointy rocks that jut from the ocean 27 miles west of San Francisco. The newcomers' hunger nearly wiped out the islands' most populous bird.

One-and-a-half centuries later, the Farallons' common murre colony is still trying to recover.

"It's growing, but it's not growing as fast as it could be," said William Sydeman, director of marine studies at the Point Reyes Bird Observatory. "If we get an oil spill at the wrong place at the wrong time, we could lose easily 50 percent. There's no cushion."

Murres (pronounced merz) once again are the most plentiful birds on the islands, breeding adults numbering about 80,000. But that's not many compared with their numbers before the Gold Rush. Biologists conservatively estimate that 500,000 adult murres -- and possibly many more -- raised chicks on the islands.

The Farallon Islands and surrounding ocean make a rich marine environment. The islands are known as the largest sea bird rookery in the continental United States. The Farallons are alive and noisy with seagulls, puffins, auklets and cormorants, to name a few; the air is thick with the pungent scent of their guano. Sea lions and seals lounge on ledges or cavort in coves.

The Farallons' abundant wildlife impressed Yankee seamen and Russian explorers in the early 19th century. They hunted the seals for their pelts, meat and blubber. The Russians also enthusiastically collected sea bird eggs -- for which they and Scandinavian peoples had developed a taste long before -- according to Peter White of Martinez, an amateur naturalist and author of "The Farallon Islands: Sentinels of the Golden Gate."

Mining the National Archives in Washington, D.C., the California State Library in Sacramento and the public library in San Francisco, White found many colorful accounts of the commercial egging spurred by the Gold Rush.

One of the first to profit from the Farallon egg trade reportedly was a pharmacist from Maine known as "Doc" Robinson. Shortly after he arrived in San Francisco in 1849, Robinson and a companion sailed to the islands. By selling the eggs he gathered there, Robinson earned enough money to open a drug store.

Two years later, another group of entrepreneurs established a business known as the Pacific Egg Co. or the Farallone Egg Co. The company constructed buildings, roads and landing facilities on the island. During the months of May, June and July, as many as 30 laborers gathered eggs.

In search of fresh eggs -- not those with a visibly developing chick embryo -- the gatherers, when they arrived for the season, would smash eggs that had already been laid, Sydeman said. That forced the birds to lay a second egg. Normally, murre couples produce a single chick in a year.

Eggers were rough men in a rough environment, according to witnesses' descriptions. Earnest Peixotto, a San Francisco artist who sketched the egg gatherers at work, wrote, "It made one shudder to see (the men) . . . scramble down the slippery cliffs, with boiling surf straight below, steadying themselves with one hand while with the other, they reached for the eggs."

While there were many bird eggs to choose from, murre eggs apparently were particularly desirable for their taste and ease of harvest, said Harry R. Carter,a sea bird biologist at the U.S. Geological Survey's Western Ecological Research Center in Dixon.

"They nested on the surface, so you could just walk along and pick them up," Carter said. "Other birds nested in holes on the ground."

In its infancy, California had no poultry industry, which further boosted the value of murre eggs. Carter cited one account of eggs sold away from market for as much as $6 to $9 a dozen. In San Francisco, prices began at about $1.50 a dozen; by 1896, they had dropped to 12 cents a dozen.

The eggs were used predominantly by restaurants and bakeries in San Francisco, but Carter surmises that miners carried the nuggets of protein inland. "I imagine that these eggs were . . . transported wherever they could get to before they got bad," Carter said. "I imagine they went up to Sacramento, at least."

The egging company was ousted from the islands in 1881 by the federal government, which operated a lighthouse on the Farallons and challenged the company's presence from the start. Lighthouse keepers continued the practice of egg gathering until late 1896, when ornithologists at the California Academy of Sciences successfully pressured the federal government to ban egging once and for all.

In the years since, the Farallons' breeding murre colony has swelled and shrunk. Chronic coastal oil pollution depressed the population's growth for much of this century, Sydeman said.

By the early 1980s, murre numbers rose to about 100,000. But the population faltered less than a decade later, this time because the birds were drowning in gill nets. Now those fishing nets, for the most part, are not allowed where murres dive for food.

Around the world, common murres are, in fact, common, Sydeman said,with a global population of about 20 million. But Sydeman thinks the Farallon murres will never regain their pre-Gold Rush abundance. The environment has probably changed too much.