Terrible photos from East Grande Terre Island, Louisiana

While BP struggles to protect itself from justice, and BP CEO Tony Hayward continues to make a public ass of himself, – as Janet Rubchenko leads NOAA into irrelavancy, the Oil that this industry and the State have loosed upon the world continues to poison and kill.

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Less than 10% of Dead Birds Collected on Gulf Coast Reported as Visibly Oiled

     As of 31 May, the official toll on birds in the catastrophic Deepwater Horizon well blowout stands at 568, which includes the 74 birds who have been rescued and brought into care at one of the four rehabilitation facilities set up along the north Gulf coast.
     Of the 74 birds, which the report does not break down by species, 57 have been rescued in Louisiana,  closest to the gushing well, and hardest hit by oil. 1 bird has been brought into the Mississippi facility, and the rest are split between Alabama and Florida. So far, 24 have been released, hundreds of miles away, near Tampa as well as on the East coast.

First victims of oil spill released in Pelican Island National Wildlife Refuge

     The daily report from the US Fish and Wildlife Service breaks the two categories of live and dead down into visibly oiled, no visible oil, and pending. Pending describes those animals whose oiling is not obvious in the field, according to information gotten from the Deepwater Horizon Response website, and is meant to be resolved into either of the other two categories in the clinic, or lab. 69 of 74, or 93%, of the live birds rescued were visibly oiled.
      Strikingly, among the 494 dead birds collected, only 29, or 6%, were reported as visibly oiled, while 70% (348) of these birds were reported as not visibly oiled. The percentage of non visibly oiled birds may climb due to the 110 ‘pending’ cases of the 186 dead birds found in Louisiana.
      Also worth noting, while Louisiana far outpaces the other three states for live oiled birds captured and brought into care, dead birds have been found more evenly distributed. In Alabama, 137 dead birds have been collected, with only 5 of them visibly oiled. 133 dead birds have been collected in Florida, 7 of them visibly oiled. In Louisiana, besides the 110 pending cases, 15 visibly oiled birds have been collected along with 61 non-visibly oiled birds, while only 2 of the 38 dead birds collected in Mississippi are reported as visibly oiled.
      
    Oil can kill birds in a number of ways. What we see most often, however are birds visibly oiled (with perhaps only a small amount, but visible) that have caused a typically water-dwelling bird to come to shore due to a loss of waterproofing.  Oil violates the integrity of an aquatic bird’s feather structure allowing water to penetrate to the their skin. If a bird is to maintain a normal body temperature that can range from 102-106˚F (approx 40-42˚C) the critical function of feathers as insulation and waterproofing cannot be impaired.
     In other words, oiled aquatic birds become cold and wet. They have to get out.  However, adapted to life on water, many aquatic birds are wholly unsuited for land, and are highly vulnerable when beached.  Although they might find relief from the cold, on shore things only get worse. By actively preening, all birds keep their feathers clean and functional. When oiled,  preening leads to ingestion of oil and the eventual poisoning.
Eared grebes beached afer Cosco Busan fuel oil spill in San Francisco Bay 11/07
 
Without intervention by a rehabilitator, a bird in this situation is going to die. The greater the extent of oiling, the more quickly comes death, but almost any amount of oiling can kill.
     While the internal effects of oil do kill birds, these effects are hard to come by without external oiling present – which leads to the question: why is such a high percentage of the dead birds not visibly oiled?
     The USFWS report offers no conclusions and leaves many significant questions unasked and unanswered. Why are there so many non-oiled dead birds in the spill zone? Have any tests been done to determine the cause of death? What species are being affected? How many oiled birds are being observed in the field? In a region so rich in aquatic birds, in an oil spill of such magnitude, why have so few birds been brought into care? In the response to the devastation that this spill is wreaking on the Gulf, are all hands really on deck? Given the unprecedented quantities and highly controversial use of dispersants such as Corexit 9500 it seems these questions deserve public answers.

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Why are there so few birds captured?

     Two days ago the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) released the latest toll of the wildlife victims from the ongoing oil spill caused by the wreck of the Deepwater Horizon. (see below for post earlier today) So far, 66 live birds have been captured. 478 dead birds have been collected between Louisiana and the Florida Panhandle. The update from USFWS does not break these numbers down by species, but as of 22 May, Brown Pelicans and Northern Gannets constituted the majority of birds.
     Also reported, 16 live sea turtles have been captured, although only 3 of these were visibly oiled.* 224 dead sea turtles have also been collected, and so far 216 of these animals have yet to be confirmed as oiled or not.
     25 dead marine mammals, including an unspecified number of dolphins, have been found, 15 of them in Louisiana. The report did not provide information on the species of turtles or mammals either.
     16 birds and 1 turtle have been released.
     This update came on the heels of the failure of the latest attempt made by engineers at BP to stanch the flow of oil from the blow out, now officially estimated to be flowing at 500,000 to 1,000,000 gallons each day.  Though independent scientists, such as Dr. Ian MacDonald, an oceanographer at Florida State University maintain that 1,000,000 gallons/day is the conservative end of the scale, with credible estimates ranging as high as 4,000,000 gallons/day.
     One of the sad commonplaces of the world today is the image of a bird in oil. Oil spills kill. They kill fish. They kill otters. They kill whales. But birds are killed in oil spills by the thousands, and hundreds of thousands. When a container ship hit the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, November of 2007,  58,000 gallons of bunker fuel spilled into San Francisco Bay.  Within days close to 1100 birds, Surf Scoters, Greater and Lesser Scaup, Western, Clark’s, Eared and Horned Grebes, Bufflehead, Common Murres, even a few Brown Pelicans, and more were captured alive. 2500 were collected dead. It can be extrapolated that thousands more were killed and never found. How many thousands is not clear, but most assessments multiply by a factor of at least 5 and as many as 10 times the number found.
     And it doesn’t take a large spill to produce a high number of casualties. In June 2005, tropical storm Arlene passed through Breton Sound and a small discharge of crude oil from a platform operated by Amerda Hess (about 500 gallons) was swept over nearby South Breton Island. Approximately 1200 nestling Brown Pelicans were covered with oil. The colony failed. 450 birds were brought into care. In the end just over 200 were taken out to North Breton Island, to be released.
       Now we have the worst oil spill in US history, with another 60 days of spilling likely. Yet only 66 birds have been captured alive. If anyone believed that such a low number reflected some miraculously minimal impact, this would be cause for celebration – a bright spot in the nightmare currently unfolding.
       But no one believes that.


this just in – another update from USFWS

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efforts to stop leak fail, meanwhile the slick spreads…

     On Saturday, 29 May, BP conceded that their effort to stanch the flow of oil from the wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon using drilling mud, golf balls and other debris had failed. BP and the United States Coast Gaurd have also released their revised estimate of the volume of escaping oil to be somewhere between 500,000 and 1,000,000 gallons per day. This figure comes closer to the estimates that independent scientists have been suggesting since 27 April, when SkyTruth and Dr. Ian MacDonald of Florida State University, first announced an estimate of at least 1.1 million gallons and very possibly much more. Currently the drilling of relief wells, the only proven method of stopping an offshore blowout, begun in early May and not expected to be completed until August,  is reported to be 6,000 feet into the rock.
      Today is the 40th day of this crisis. Every day another million gallons, at least, erupts into the Gulf. By the latest satellite imagery, the slick appears to be well ‘entrained’ in the warm ocean current that flows out of the Gulf of Mexico and becomes the Gulf stream, moving up the East coast of the North America and eventually across the Atlantic to northern Europe.

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