His audience is a seabird called the common murre, and his trick is to lure the birds back to a breeding site they abandoned after an oil spill more than a decade ago.
Murres breed in loud, crowded colonies on narrow cliff ledges.
Parker and his colleagues from the San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge want to convince the birds that the abandoned site, Devil's Slide Rock, is the hot, hip place to breed. The decoys, mirrors, and amplified recordings of murre calls are supposed to assure murres still looking for a place to settle down that everyone is doing it here. It isn't easy. Devil's Slide Rock island juts 70 feet out of the Pacific Ocean. They said it would be impossible to work on that rock.