Booms Can't Protect Marshland Birds
June 10, 2010 — -- Rescuer David Hayden is on a mission. He fights his way through thick, overgrown mangroves in temperatures hovering close to 100 degrees, staving off attacks from birds angered by his mere presence and proximity to their nests.
On this trip today, Hayden and his rescue team captured three oil-loaded brown billed pelicans -- all less than a year old -- with their feathers stuck together because of the oil. The pelicans are a fragile species that were removed from the wildlife endangered list in 2009.
"Those three are the most heavily oiled on the island; they need to be saved," said Hayden of the sludge-covered birds.
Nearly two months after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, scores of sick, oil-covered birds have started to turn up in the delicate wetlands along the Louisiana coast, including waves of baby birds with their once white feathers already tainted with the black, hazardous sludge.
Efforts to save these most vulnerable victims of the spill have intensified since the first oil-soaked bird was found. The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries is concentrating much of its effort on the animal rescue facility in the tiny gulf coast city of Cat Island.
Rescue efforts have been delayed, though, by the labyrinthine topography of the Louisiana marshlands, where oil from the BP's Deepwater Horizon rig has started to come ashore. The mangroves are too thick, and the habitat too fragile for the canoes bearing rescuers to navigate. Rescuers insist the island is too densely populated with nesting birds to risk entry.
"There's plenty on the inside," Baker said. "There's no way of telling how many."
Though the baby birds have not yet ventured out of their nests, their mothers, coated with oil, are bringing the toxic mess with them as they return to feed their young.
"Yesterday was the first day we started receiving babies," said veterinarian Erica Miller, head of the animal rescue facility where the birds are brought to be cleaned. "The oil must have hit one of the nesting colonies, because the birds have it on the nesting colonies."
