The oil may be slowly disappearing from the Gulf of Mexico, at least on the surface. But the toxic brew continues to leave its deadly mark, now showing up on the wings of fledglings, the young birds on the verge of claiming their birthright of flight. For expert wildlife rescuers, there's no end to the stress.
At an old warehouse, once the habitat of forklifts, soiled birds peep from every corner. "Last week a couple of hundred (birds) came in," says Jay Holcomb, head of the International Bird Rescue Research Centre (IBRRC), as he walks through a new rescue station in Hammond, Louisiana. "It was a real spike."
The former quarters were in the oil spill region, too close to the coast risks from tropical storms. The move inland into a space formerly used to store wood products was bitterly necessary, expanding the capacity to handle up to 3,000 birds - three times as many as before - as rescue workers wash and feed the birds in preparation for release.
BP Plc, whose ruptured, spewing oil well is the source of the unprecedented spill, is paying the bills. The wellhead has been closed since July 15, while work to permanently seal off the oil will continue for weeks. "We hope that the numbers will go down with the well capped," Holcomb says. The IBRRC calls the station a "clinic," an hour's drive north of New Orleans.
The patients keep getting younger. In the beginning, the rescue population was mainly adult pelicans; now it's little, laughing gull fledglings and the young of other bird species. "The young birds are like kids - they want to play in the puddles," Holcomb says. For shore birds, the oil lies in wait in exactly such puddles on fouled coastlines.
More than 1,400 birds have been found dead and visibly oiled, mostly in Louisiana. More than 1,600 birds have been found alive but coated with rust-red oil. Sea turtles have been next hardest hit: more than 270 were found alive and oiled. For about 20 of the reptiles, help came too late. Those are the provisional numbers. The 1989 Exxon-Valdez spill off the coast of Alaska claimed an estimated 250,000 marine birds, 2,800 otters, 300 sea lions, 250 eagles and 20 whales.
More than 500 birds are at the Hammond station this week - a number that can still climb drastically. About half are laughing gulls. Many of the animals huddle with hypothermia under ultraviolet lights in the intensive care station, some are only a little dirty, while others have been washed and are living outside in large cages awaiting release - to take place far from the oil in the south- eastern states of Georgia, Florida or Texas.
Most of the young birds must stay longer at the clinic than the older ones. "We are basically raising them, because they can't fly yet," Holcomb says. For him and his nearly 50 workers, there's no end of work in sight: "It's not over." It's hard to tell how long the clinic will stay in operation, says Holcomb, who has been rescuing birds for more than a quarter of a century: "We assume a few more months, through September."
Since IBRRC arrived in the Gulf in late April, helpers have cleaned up more than 1,200 birds. "I don't want to underplay the oil spill, but after three months, 1,250 birds are not many," Holcomb says. "But we don't know how many are dead and how many are oiled and still out there."
Comments
Comments are closed.