We spent some time last week in Big Basin State Park, a glorious facility in the Santa Cruz Mountains that we recently learned is the California’s oldest state park. The park is notable for a lot of reasons, one of which has to do with the Marbled Murrelet. For years, researchers knew very little about the breeding habits of this bird species, until park employees found a nest in Big Basin State Park in 1974. This was our first clue that the Marbled Murrelet, a seabird, actually breeds in old growth forests on land. Unfortunately, now the Big Basin Marbled Murrelet population is declining rapidly throughout the Santa Cruz Mountains. The main cause is corvid predation – crows, jays, and ravins attacking nests. While human activity has never benefited murrelets, it has done wonders for corvids, which thrive on the fringes of development and have adapted well to raiding trash cans and campsites for food. As the numbers of corvids increases, the predation threat to other species grows greater, and it is not clear if the important populations of Marbled Murrelets in the Santa Cruz Mountains can survive this process.