Weekend Birdery: Oil Cleanup Crews May Be Worse Than Oil
At coastal nesting sites in Florida, well-meaning oil cleanup crews have inadvertently trampled shorebird nesting sites, apparently becoming as much of a threat as the oil itself in some cases. A resource management specialist at the Gulf Islands National Seashore at Pensacola Beach (shown below) was quoted by National Geographic as saying, “the cleanup can do more damage than the oil could ever do.”
From April to August each year, rare shorebirds such as the snowy plover and least tern lay nests of two to three eggs directly on the softly undulating, open dunes about 40 feet (13 meters) from the water’s edge.
Snowy plovers and least terns are considered threatened in Florida. When nesting, both species’ survival depends on limited contact with people.
But with oil encroaching on Florida’s coasts, an army of cleanup crews has descended on the seashore. About 44,300 people are now de-oiling roughly 450 miles (720 kilometers) of Gulf coastline, according to the website for the Deepwater Horizon Unified Command, the joint federal-industry task force responding to the Gulf oil spill.
With so many people working so close to breeding grounds, frightened adult birds are abandoning their nests, and adults and chicks are being inadvertently trampled.
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