Laura Erickson's For the Birds

The cover story for the September–October issue of Audubon was a long and detailed “Special Report: The BP Oil Disaster,” written by one of their most prominent writers, Ted Williams, who has a long and storied career as a conservationist and a curmudgeon.

Williams’s regular Audubon columns were titled “Incite,” and he often wrote them in an angry Lewis Black style. He was extremely vociferous about one important issue facing birds, domestic cats, but seemed to think most of the major environmental battles had already been won, by his generation. He smugly wrote in his November-December 2004, column:

I envy young environmentalists of the 21st century, but I feel bad for them, too. They don’t know what it feels like to win big against seemingly impossible odds. When I started out, America and the world were environmentally lawless. There was no Endangered Species Act, no Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, no Clean Water Act, no Clean Air Act, no National Environmental Policy Act, no National Forest Management Act.

Thank goodness our serious environmental problems are over, right? When he was sent to the Gulf by Audubon, he limited his entire “investigation” to places BP staff and contractors brought him to exactly as if he were doing public relations for BP, not trying to uncover the truth. When he lambasted a “toxic gusher, one of misinformation,” he wasn’t talking about the many BP lies swirling about. No—he actually repeated scientifically discredited information as fact. He wrote, comparing this to the Exxon Valdez spill:

Deepwater Horizon oil is different. It is highly volatile, and nearly half evaporates immediately. In the intense heat, bacteria consume other fractions. Also, the leak is almost 50 miles at sea, giving dispersion and natural breakdown processes more time to kick in.

He also gushed, “Much has been learned about boom laying and skimming, and operations are massive and intense.” I couldn’t help but think about the oiled Black-crowned Night-Heron I’d seen sitting on oiled boom, and the prisoners on work release tossing small shovelfuls of oiled sand into plastic bags. I could feel how hot the water along shore was when I visited West Ship Island in Mississippi, but it was easy to research how further out from shore, the temperature drops precipitously as you move down the water column from the surface to the depths, where it can be 40–30º F.

Drew Wheelan had posted a lot about how much of a difference qualified volunteers could have made. Ted Williams dismissed that:

Audubon is seeking volunteers experienced in handling seabirds and asking them to sign up with response leaders. But at this writing there aren’t so many oiled birds that state and federal recovery personnel can’t handle the job. Therefore, qualified volunteers are being told to stand by in case they’re needed. The very last thing Gulf Coast birds need are well-meaning amateurs crashing through nesting habitat.

Drew Wheelan, I, and many others were criticizing Audubon for not galvanizing these volunteers (including many very qualified and professional rehabbers), but Williams defended this:

It’s hard to do nothing when the world is yammering at you to do something—anything, even the wrong thing. This was a lesson I relearned on the humid, 100-degree morning of June 15 when I visited bay islands with Reid and his Audubon colleagues Melanie Driscoll, director of bird conservation for Audubon’s Louisiana Coastal Initiative, and Karen Westphal, Atchafalaya River Basin program manager.The saddest scene we encountered—up close, from Wolkart’s 24-foot Ranger Bay boat—was the royal tern colony on Queen Bess Island. Ringing the oil-stained mangroves was red hard boom and, just inside, white sorbent boom. Such barricades offer partial protection at best. Only about 10 of some 300 adults had been oiled, but virtually all the estimated 150 chicks were covered. “If we do nothing, they could die,” said Driscoll. “They’re at risk of overheating and sunburn, hypothermia if they get wet. But if we evacuate them, they won’t be taught to fend for themselves, and they’ll probably die, too. The thought is that now that they’re close to molting they’ll drop their oiled feathers and a few will make it. I don’t know if that’s a good theory, but we’re in a situation where there’s no good decision. The best decision is not to have an oil spill.”

Let’s put aside the issues of compassion for suffering birds and how much progress in bird rehab we’ve made since the Exxon Valdez. Let’s just simply consider the question of whether the oiled young birds had a higher chance of survival if they were left or if they were retrieved for rehab. At the very least, shouldn’t scientists have retrieved some of those chicks on some of those islands to learn, based on actual data, which approach was actually wiser? That is what science is about. But had any of those birds been captured, BP’s “Consolidated Oiled Wildlife Report” totals would have been higher.

There were many different ways that volunteers could have been used without compromising cleanup or responsible, legal wildlife rehab protocols. For example, teams could have been sent out on prescribed routes to check, at a safe distance, the boom around vulnerable islands to alert cleanup response teams where boom needed to be replaced or better secured before it got washed onto islands. When I was in the Gulf at the end of July, over three months after the BP explosion, a crew was working at one still-unoiled island, putting in vertical structures to better hold the boom in place—the kind of task that requires hard work but minimal skills. And just how trained were the prisoners on work-release programs who were doing so much of the cleanup as it was?

Ted Williams seemed to accept BP’s “nothing to see here, folks!” message, writing in his “special report” in Audubon:

Due to the nature of the oil and the monumental cleanup effort, visible damage was not as bad as the public imagines or the media have depicted. Occasionally we smelled oil, but although goop and tar had washed up elsewhere, we saw only light sheens.

Where I was a month later, there wasn’t much to smell in most areas, but after standing on one oiled beach for 20 minutes or so, I felt woozy and faint without smelling anything. By his own account, Williams was not exposed to any oiled beaches.

Promoting BP’s take on all this rather than talking to professional rehabbers who’d spent long careers capturing and treating oiled birds was egregiously poor “reporting,” especially unacceptable for an organization whose name is synonymous with bird conservation for so many Americans. It wouldn’t have taken much investigating for Williams to learn what the St. Petersburg Times reported right as the September-October issue of Audubon was released. The Times’ headline read “Bird Rescue Experts Kept on Sidelines after Gulf Oil Spill.” [This is yet another article that is no longer available online.] And not once did Williams try to contact Drew Wheelan—everything he wrote about him was taken from watching him on TV! He wrote:

In an interview with CNN’s Gary Tuchman, the American Birding Association’s Drew Wheelan declared: “I cannot see any reason why they would not want as many people here as possible.” And in a later CNN broadcast he and Anderson Cooper spoke of “experts” who supposedly possess the power to pluck birds from the firmament, a feat impossible for any human save Harry Potter.

Cooper, goosing Wheelan along: “Basically, you’re saying they’re just going after the birds who are completely covered in oil and unable to move, and these are the birds that are likeliest basically to die…So birds that maybe have less oil on them and can fly, they’re not going after those birds because it’s too much effort and too difficult.”

Wheelan: “Yeah, they just don’t have any expertise in that area. . . . There’s no reason why there shouldn’t be 50 people down in Grand Isle . . . going out at dawn, trying to capture these birds.”

Cooper: “It seems there are a lot of volunteers and a lot of bird experts who would love to be down here and love to be helping.”

Wheelan: “Absolutely. . . . I know the Audubon Society has over 17,000 people that have signed up to volunteer on this effort, and so far they’ve not received a single phone call. . . . They just don’t want to allow any help.” (Wheelan issued a retraction on his blog after Audubon explained to him that the best way volunteers can help is to wait patiently until they’re contacted.)

That parenthetical last sentence is an outright lie. Right after the article came out, Drew Wheelan wrote on Facebook on September 2:

I did not retract anything I wrote about the Audubon Society and their volunteers. They had many opportunities that could have helped down here that they let slip through their fingers. The blame is really on Incident Command for not identifying areas of need and allowing qualified people to help…

Audubon has had every opportunity to work as stewards to protect beach nesting colonies in Louisiana, and I was specifically told by Melanie Driscoll to lay off the issue, as she had it covered. They did nothing. Colonies from the Chandeleur Islands to the Timbaliers have all been impacted negatively by clean up response, and LDWF and Audubon never did a thing to help….

Beginning in May and sticking it out for months, Drew Wheelan worked tirelessly in Grand Isle and other places in the Gulf virtually every day except when he developed pneumonia. He was operating on a shoestring, even mostly sleeping in his truck, doing what Ted Williams once did so well—speaking truth to power. Not one word that Drew Wheelan wrote or spoke was in service of any agenda except to present the truth about what was happening to birds as a result of the oil spill. He saw a lot of things that were being done badly, and a lot of things that badly needed being done, and wrote about them with charmingly unfiltered forthrightness.

I returned home after spending time with Drew and seeing with my own eyes so much that he’d written about. When I read Audubon‘s “Special Report” targeting not the corporation that caused the biggest oil spill in peacetime or maritime history but the one young environmentalist of the 21st century who most exemplified the standards Williams used to stand for, I quit Audubon and rejoined the American Birding Association.