August 7, 2026 — Every month, Giovanny Suárez Espín walks a beach near his home in southern Ecuador, monitoring for dead seabirds. Usually, he sees maybe a handful.
But on recent surveys, the sand has been littered with carcasses.
“Every 10 steps you took, you found five or 10 birds, and it kept going,” said Suárez, who works for American Bird Conservancy, a nonprofit group. “On the three-kilometer walk, we saw lots of dead birds the whole way.”
In June, Suárez and others tallied 638 dead birds on the beaches of three provinces in Ecuador, about seven times the number found over the previous year and a half combined.
“It’s painful,” he said.
In July, they counted an additional 968.
It’s too soon to say for certain what has caused the spike in deaths, which has affected various species, including sooty shearwaters, Peruvian and blue-footed boobies, cormorants, petrels and the critically endangered waved albatross. Die-offs in sea birds aren’t uncommon, and can stem from a variety of factors. In 2023, Ecuador saw mass deaths from avian influenza, said Sebastián Cruz, a seabird ecologist who runs the South American marine bird program for American Bird Conservancy.
But this time, he said, looks different. The birds’ bodies are emaciated. Testing for bird flu is needed, but the few necropsies that have been conducted, along with the behavior of surviving birds, show no signs of infection. And critically, sea surface temperatures off the coast have been exceptionally elevated.
This points to an alarming possibility: The seabirds could already be victims of the building El Niño, a natural climate phenomenon whose effects are now occurring while the planet dangerously warms.
In recent months, as scientists have predicted an El Niño that could be the strongest in recorded history, the attention has focused on how it could hurt humans. And it could hurt us a lot, potentially bringing record heat, drought and torrential rain.
But wildlife stands to suffer, too. Marine mammals and seabirds are among the most at risk.