The strange sight of dead seabirds black against the white snows of winter far from their natural habitat has become an all too common occurrence these days along a wilderness snowmobile trail that runs for hundreds of miles into the wild north of Alaska’s largest city.

Worse than the dead birds, though, are the birds seen swimming in the rare pockets of open water along the fast-flowing Susitna and Yentna rivers. These are starving animals still struggling to live, and yet doomed to die prematurely.

Wildlife scientists say the dead and dying birds – 18in tall common murres – are only a few among what might be as many as 100,000 or more of their species losing the battle to survive in the storm-pounded North Pacific Ocean.

Since late summer, thousands of murres have washed up dead on beaches along the Gulf of Alaska after apparently dying at sea. Others were strong enough to get airborne in fall or winter only to be swept inland as seasonal storms roiled the offshore waters.

Dead common murres lie washed up on a rocky beach in Whittier, Alaska. Photograph: Mark Thiessen/AP

An estimated 8,000 dead murres showed up on the beaches near Whittier, an isolated community of only about 220 people 60 miles south-east of here. Thousands more were found dead near Homer, a popular summer tourist destination 125 miles to the south that is home to about 5,000 year-round residents.

As yet, no has any clue as to exactly how many carcasses litter the remote and little visited beaches along the hundreds of miles of undeveloped coast that rims the Alaska gulf, according to John Piatt at the Alaska Science Center of the US Geological Survey. The full death count might never be known.

Piatt has spent almost 30 years studying Alaska murres and other seabirds. He has seen big die-offs before. He and other researchers estimated 120,000 murres died of starvation in the winter of 1993. About 185,000 were calculated to have perished after being smeared with a mousse-like emulsion of water and oil that spewed out of Prince William Sound and rampaged north across the gulf after the Exxon Valdez oil tanker spilled 11m gallons of crude oil in1989.

What has been different this time is the number of dying murres pushed inland by an oscillating jet stream that has played havoc with Alaska weather for the past two winters. Some blame climate change, but climate experts say it is hard determine whether Alaska is witnessing a long-term shift or only a strange, short-term anomaly in a region where the weather is notoriously unpredictable.

Whichever the case, winds that normally blow west to east across the Pacific have been eddying into a south to north pattern as the atmosphere swirls like a whirlpool in a river. Starving murres still strong enough to get airborne have found themselves caught in warm, moist winds of up to 100mph roaring north out of the gulf into the heart of the 49th state.

Thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of the birds rode these winds until they faded only to find themselves stranded and awaiting death far from their natural habitat. Some birds were pushed over the towering Alaska Range mountains into the bitterly cold Alaska interior hundreds of miles from the sea.

Most, however, came to earth near this city or just to the north in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley. Urban Alaskans rallied to save those found on or adjacent to the state’s few roadways.

The Bird Treatment and Learning Center here has taken in 411 murres since October, said director Guy Runco. In a normal year, the center handles 600 to 700 birds of all species. One or two of them might be murres. “It’s really strange,’’ Runco said.

Rehabilitating malnourished murres has taxed the center’s finance and its staff of volunteers, and there’s no telling if saving the murres has had any environmental value. Released back into the wild fat and well fed, they could just end up starving again.

A man feeds salmon chunks to a common murre. Photograph: Mark Thiessen/AP

Murres need to eat about a fiftieth of their body weight in small fish per day to survive. Piatt and other scientists said the birds are obviously having problems finding enough food. The causes could be a decline in forage fish or simply a shift in where the forage fish feed.

Some have pondered climate change there, too. The forage fish thrive in cold water, and the water in the gulf has been unusually warm this year. It could be the fish declined because of this – or that they moved away from the normal feeding grounds of the murre as they sought cooler waters.

The murre die-off, though dramatic, is not thought to be any threat to the species as a whole given that there are an estimated 2.8 million breeding murres in 230 nesting colonies in Alaska. There are also animals that have benefited from the tragedy of the murres.

“The eagles are eating well,’’ Runco said. Alaska’s bald eagles are notoriously efficient scavengers. So, too, the state’s ravens, magpies, coyotes, foxes, mink, weasels and other animals.

Jean Gabryszak, whose family runs the remote Yentna Station Roadhouse, said: “The ravens are all fat and happy.’’