Laura Erickson's For the Birds

Last week, the oil stopped gushing in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s still seeping, and it turns out there are other seeps associated with some of the thousands of active and abandoned oil wells in the Gulf, but the overall reaction has been an enormous sigh of relief. On NPR’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me this weekend, Peter Sagal asked the panel to name the new villain now that this catastrophe is over.

The problem is, the catastrophe is no more over with than the Exxon Valdez catastrophe was over five hours after the ship struck Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound and its cargo stopped flowing out because the ship had been emptied.

A minimum of 92 million gallons of oil, and quite possibly over 200 million gallons, has gushed into the Gulf since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, and only a tiny fraction has so far made its way to shore. Millions of gallons of toxic dispersants have been released in the Gulf too. Much of this mess is still going to make its way to marshes and beaches in the coming weeks and months, and the water itself is going to take years or even decades to be restored to health.

The natural microorganisms that feed on oil are abundant in the Gulf, which is good news, but the bad news is that as they feed on the oil, they use up oxygen. This will greatly expand the dead zone, the area with no plankton or other small organisms that provide the food base for wildlife from shrimp to whales that live in the Gulf.

So yes, if BP’s cap really has stopped the oil from gushing, this is cause for relief in the way that an emergency room team breathes a sigh of relief when they finally clamp a spurting artery in a patient, but then they still have to deal with the shrapnel, broken bones, and damaged organs.

As of Monday, July 19, a total of 3,515 oiled birds have been collected in the Gulf. 2,283 of these were dead when they were picked up. There are no statistics made about the number of birds picked up alive that subsequently die. All we know is that of the 1,232 birds collected alive, thus far 534 have been cleaned and released, and there are no statistics made public about the number of oiled birds that are not picked up at all.

Drew Whelan from the American Birding Association saw and photographed a great many oiled birds at Queen Bess Island in Louisiana, but these birds are not included in the official count because the official judgment is to keep rescuers away from breeding colonies even when the vast majority of the birds there are in peril for fear of frightening the few that so far had not been oiled. A film crew from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology discovered that oil had washed onto Raccoon Island, also off Louisiana, and that that oiled many birds, but days later a concerned citizen asked officials at a Deepwater Horizon Response Open House about the nesting colony and was assured by fisheries and wildlife agents there that the island was still pristine.

BP has a vested interest in minimizing the official count of oiled birds because the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service levies fines based on the total number. That may be the reason why BP is not allowing Wildlife Rehabilitation and Education, a large non-profit rehab center in Houston, Texas, the most experienced group in the entire region to help with rehab despite the fact that they have a network of over 200 staff and volunteers and have more experience dealing specifically with oiled birds than any other group in the Gulf.

Instead, BP chose a small corporation called Wildlife Response Services to handle the entire situation. I’m sure they can justify this by saying that this company has all the certification necessary, but why did they limit themselves to just one corporation when so many birds and other animals need help right now? Concerned people who come across oiled animals are strictly forbidden to bring them to rehab centers themselves but have to wait for the rehabbers to come to the animals.

I’ll try to attend some of the public information meetings down there to find out answers to this and other questions.

Yes, I’m breathing a sigh of relief that the gusher may have stopped, but the damage to wildlife is ongoing.

I’m Laura Erickson, speaking for the Birds.