One way to assess how well seabirds are doing during the breeding season is to examine their time budgets-- that is, how much time do they allocate to various activities? In Cook Inlet, we have measured "loafing time" in Common Murres at three colonies. This is a sensitive measure of how hard murres are working to find food and raise chicks, because the harder they work, the less time they have to hang around the nest with their mates. We found that there is a great deal of variability in loafing time among colonies, and within colonies between years. This is correlated with our independent measures of food supply (obtained from acoustic surveys, trawling and seining). In general, their was a persistent difference in time budgets between the three islands. Gull Island murres always had the most time for loafing, while those at Chisik Island rarely spent much time loafing. Accordingly, food is generally most abundant and available nearby to murres at Gull Island, whereas Chisik Island murres must range a great distance to find food. By adjusting their time budgets, murres are capable of maintaining similar levels of productivity (chicks raised per pair of breeding adults) among islands.