Crude, Degrading
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration provides this chart of where all the spilled Deepwater Horizon oil has gone:
Bradford Plumer summarizes:
About one-quarter of the oil is still bobbing on the sea surface or washed ashore. Another quarter has been dispersed into microscopic droplets, either by artificial chemicals or natural processes. And another quarter has been “dissolved.” All told, just 25 percent has been physically removed from the Gulf ecosystem. The rest is still lurking… somewhere.
It’s good to know that much of the oil has evaporated or been dispersed. The trouble is, as Kate Sheppard notes, that there are still “about nine and a half Exxon Valdez spills” out there.
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.
Oil Spills? Don’t Worry, They Happen All the Time
Kate Sheppard shares the map below from a National Wildlife Federation report on the many oil-production incidents which occurred in recent years, before BP captured our full attention. Sheppard writes:
From 2000 to 2009, onshore pipeline accidents caused 2,554 major incidents, including 161 deaths and 576 injuries. Offshore, 1,443 incidents caused 41 fatalities, 302 injuries, 476 fires, and 356 releases of pollution into the waters.
Weekend Birdery: Not Good for the Goose
It has been upsetting for bird lovers to see images of gulf birds coated in oil and to watch the casualty counts climb. As of its July 16 report (pdf), the Fish and Wildlife Service had collected 2,095 dead birds in the Gulf spill region—823 of which were visibly oiled. Another 1,174 visibly oiled birds have been collected alive.
The loss of birds and other wildlife as a consequence of the spill has been tragic, as everyone agrees, but at least they weren’t killed intentionally. One can’t say the same for the massive numbers of Canada Goose that have been corralled and gassed in New York City recently. Nearly 400 in Prospect Park alone were herded to their death last week (they were molting and couldn’t fly away), and another 1,235 were likewise exterminated last summer in different locations around the city.
The geese are believed to present a danger to air travel in the area. And in the wake of the Flight 1549 incident, the city has been determined to cull geese populations within 7 miles of the airports. There is some dispute, however (according to this NYT story), about whether local New Yorker geese pose the same danger as migrating, tourist geese.
Anyway there are better ways to control populations of geese. Relocation and release would be more comforting, but it’s not an option; the Canada Goose, Branta canadensis, has proven so adaptable to human environs that it has made itself into a pest all across the continental United States. Nobody wants more of them. But more humane alternatives like egg addling are available—alternatives which are probably much cheaper and more environmentally friendly than sending hundreds of adult geese to suffocation chambers, double-bagging their carcasses, and dumping them in a landfill.
Oily Bird Doesn’t Get the Worm
GrrlScientist writes:
When oiled, seabirds are vulnerable to drowning because their feathers’ waterproofing qualities are destroyed and their downy feathers’ insulative properties are lost, leading to either hypothermia or sometimes, as is the case for many Gulf birds, hyperthermia. Oiled birds lose body weight rapidly as their metabolism increases to compensate for their falling body temperature. Sticky, oiled feathers are heavy and cannot trap air between them to keep the birds buoyant, so they cannot fly and often sink into a watery grave below the waves. Thus, birds are very particular about their plumage, and use their bills and tongues to remove debris, including oil, despite its terrible taste and smell. They sometimes ingest the oil, which causes health problems, such as ulcers and damage to internal organs that detoxify the blood.
The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) has collected a total of 1,589 “visibly oiled” birds in the Gulf since the BP Deepwater spew began, according to FWS’ July 9 report (pdf). The good news is that the number of cleaned and released birds has been climbing, now up to 450 (28.3%). Oily birds found dead number 569 (35.7%). That leaves 571 (35.9%) oily birds captured and in some stage of rehabilitation. GrrlScientist notes that the International Bird Rescue Research Center (IBRRC) has reported average release rates of 50%-80% over its nearly 40 years of operation, but survival rates after release vary greatly with the circumstances of the spill, the species affected, and the rescue response.
Another 1,056 birds collected from the Gulf have been found dead with no visible signs of oil. It’s my understanding that FWS will be making cause-of-death determinations on these, but so far we don’t know how many of these can be chalked up to the spill. Daily updates of all FWS collections (non-birds, too) are available here.
Picture via Buzzfeed, How to Clean a Pelican.
Weekend Spillery: Pelican Brief
Is the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico going to wipe out the brown pelican? Not globally, at least, writes Phil McKenna at the New Scientist:
The species as a whole isn’t about to go extinct as a result of the oil spill: as 400,000 out of a total global population of 650,000 live in Peru. Roughly 60 per cent of the subspecies Pelecanus occidentalis carolinensis breed along the Gulf coast, where many nest on the barrier islands off Louisiana that have already been exposed to oil.
The slicks threaten the birds and their fragile wetland habitat only a few months after brown pelicans were removed from the US federal endangered and threatened species list in November last year. The birds had been on the list since 1970 after the pesticide DDT poisoned and nearly wiped out pelicans across the country. At the time Louisiana, where the pelican is the official state bird, lost its entire population. After years of resettling individual birds from Atlantic coast populations, Louisiana was able to boast the largest brown pelican population of any Gulf state, with 16,000 nesting pairs in 2004.
Just a small clarification: it’s true that Louisiana’s brown pelicans were just removed from the endangered list in November 2009. But the Alabama, Florida, and the Atlanta coast populations were taken off the list in 1985.
Gulf Spill Infographic
Sorry for all the lame infographic posts lately. I’ll do some real blogging again soon. But in the meantime, check out this cool infographic about the BP oil spill:
Weekend Birdery: Feathered & Tarred
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is collecting dead and injured birds (and other wildlife) in the area of the Deepwater Horizon spill. As of their June 3 report, they collected 123 “visibly oiled” birds (38 dead, 85 living). 370 birds have been found dead without visible oil, and another 119 dead birds couldn’t be classified in the field as visibly oiled or not.
Here are some disturbing images from AP Photographer Charlie Riedel:
AP/ Charlie Riedel
AP/ Charlie Riedel
AP / Charlie Riedel
AP / Charlie Riedel
More of Riedel’s pictures here.
Elections Matter: Oil Gusher Edition
In times of war and disaster, abstract concerns about the size of government are appropriately ignored. One would hope that people would always bear in mind the risks of such catastrophes when evaluating the governing philosophies of candidates for office. That is, if anybody ever actually makes an honest and open-minded evaluation of candidates’ governing philosophies, I’d hope that such risks would be taken into consideration.
Ezra Klein writes:
So though Obama deserves to take his lumps on this one, Americans should take the lesson of recent disasters, from the financial crisis to the BP spill to Katrina, and realize that they actually like having good regulators and they get upset when their regulators fail them. Which might mean it’s a good idea to elect people who are interested in making sure regulators don’t stop doing their jobs every couple of years, as opposed to people who think that the best regulation is no regulation, and the second-best regulation is whatever the relevant industry tells them it is.
Effective government is about ends and means. It requires taking both seriously. To ensure public safety and prosperity, we need regulation adequate to those ends. Elections matter.
Pensacola Beach Reporting
This post is mostly for you far-flung Pensacolians out there. The good news is that, as of Wednesday morning, Pensacola Beach is not slathered in crude. The bad news is that there’s a “sheen” of oil moving closer by the hour. The sheen was 7.5 miles from shore when the News Journal went to press last night. “Tar balls” hit Dauphin Island, AL on Tuesday, followed by pancake-sized patties on Wednesday.
Here are two pictures I took with my phone this morning. Take a good look. It may be the last you’ll see of that unspoiled quartz sand.
Weekend Birdery: Oil and Birds Don’t Mix Either
Click to enlarge image.
The Gulf oil spill is obviously bad news for birds. In addition to ocean-going waterfowl types in the area year-round, all sorts of birds migrate across the Gulf from Mexico in the spring and early summer. When they reach the Gulf shores, they are tired, stressed, hungry, and vulnerable. Disruption of food supply and degradation of island-shore nesting areas are serious concerns.
Getting covered in oil is no good either. Even a small dab is harmful and can be fatal. Petroleum can prevent feather barbs from hooking together (feathers are often described as working like velcro) to make the airtight and watertight seal necessary for regulating body temperature, flying, swimming, diving, and so on. Ingesting or breathing contaminants is no better for birds than for humans.
A few birds have been rescued so far off the coast of Louisiana: a northern gannet, a brown pelican, and at least one other, I gather. 
Rescued birds are fed and then, after building up strength for as much as 5 days, are washed with Dawn dish soap (which is apparently the most effective, suitable, and readily available cleaning agent for the purpose, according to the International Bird Rescue Research Center). Survival chances vary unpredictably, but 50%-80% of birds rescued by the IBRRC can be released, after an average of 7 days recovering in captivity.
But it’s really most important to address the longer-term habitat and food supply disruptions, if we want to avoid calamity for bird populations. It’s difficult to gauge how bad it will be. But it’s not too difficult to predict this: it will not be good.
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