Laura Erickson's For the Birds

The most disillusioning experience of my entire life was when I went down to the Gulf in July 2010, after the BP oil spill, and seeing the power BP had exerted over individual people’s lives; several of my most respected scientific, educational, and conservation non-profits; and the Obama administration.

The Deepwater Horizon explosion happened on April 20, 2010, right as I had left my job at Cornell and was packing up and driving home. I didn’t even learn about it for two or three days. Soon after I got home, BP announced that National Audubon would be coordinating volunteers to go to the Gulf to document and help retrieve oiled wildlife and help with cleanup. I was just settling in back home and had a whole lot of pressing commitments so I could not volunteer do to anything right away, but I trusted that Audubon would do a great job. Thousands of people immediately signed up, including people I knew personally who had experience retrieving oiled wildlife. But week after week, not one of them was called.

Then I discovered that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was actually prohibiting experienced, expert rehabbers who’d spent decades learning to retrieve oiled animals from coming anywhere near the oil spill. My treasured friend Marge Gibson, who led the Bald Eagle recovery team in the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez oil spill and was running REGI (Raptor Education Group, Inc.) in Antigo, Wisconsin, was told that she’d lose her federal wildlife rehab license if she turned up anywhere near the Gulf.

Instead of allowing the many trained, experienced, and licensed individuals and non-profits to get involved, BP chose a small corporation called Wildlife Response Services to coordinate all the rehabbing, saying they alone could provide the essential training necessary. On their webpage, Wildlife Response Services takes pride in “working collaboratively with our industry partners.” (https://wildliferesponse.net/mission)

Only four wildlife rehabilitation centers were allowed to treat oiled birds along the entire 1300 miles of coastline from Texas to Florida, and they were only allowed to treat the animals brought to them—not to actually retrieve any oiled wildlife themselves. If someone called them about even a very nearby oiled creature, they were told to call the BP’s rescue team. On June 8, I wrote on my blog, “When a team from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology found an oiled but still-living pelican along with an oil-drenched Snowy Egret carcass, they called the BP wildlife rescue team, which took 90 minutes to arrive, and probably at least another hour to get it to their facility.”

Some boat operators contracted by BP for other services were allowed to retrieve oiled birds, but even they were required, on pain of losing their contracts (and in many cases, their livelihoods), to leave birds that could still fly, with a very bizarre definition of “fly.” On July 27, I photographed a Black-crowned Night-Heron on a boom just out from Cat Island in Barataria Bay, a major breeding rookery for pelicans. The bird was totally covered with oil—I have photos. Our boat captain wanted to retrieve it and had the proper permits from BP, but when he brought our boat near, the poor bird made the fatal mistake of trying to open its gunked-up wings in a pitiful attempt to fly to the island. It fell into the shallow water and waded to shore, but the moment it opened its wings at all, it was doomed—the captain was no longer permitted to retrieve it because it was, by BP’s definition, “flighted.” I am not making this up. I can’t begin to say how hard my heart was beating as our boat turned away, leaving the poor thing to its horrifying fate.

Next time I’ll explain how this inhumane policy helped BP minimize their legal liability for oiled wildlife, and how even well-meaning organizations kept the word from getting out that BP had changed the rules forever.