Is BP Green Washing the Dead Wildlife Count?

Glynn Wilson

A lone great blue heron, with oil coating his legs, still looking for fish in the blocked off Little Lagoon pass on West Beach in Gulf Shores, Alabama. [Click on the image for a larger view]

by Glynn Wilson

GULF SHORES, Ala. — The Gulf of Mexico coast is usually teaming with wildlife, on the beaches or in the marshes.

While walking on the beach one day last week, however, I noticed there were almost no shore birds at water’s edge. I only saw one seagull on the public beach by the Pink Pony Pub, and only one great blue heron at Little Lagoon pass on West Beach, where there is normally a healthy population.

The week before, riding around in a flat bottom boat in Louisiana’s Barataria Bay, one of the hardest hit areas on the coast by British Petroleum’s oil gusher — still pumping a million gallons a day into the Gulf — I got the strangest feeling that we were riding around a wildlife ghost town.

Glynn Wilson

Brown pelicans face precarious survival on a barrier island rookery, surrounded by oil, in Louisiana’s Barataria Bay

The brown pelicans we saw had no choice. They were stuck on their nests on the barrier island rookeries, surrounded by the oil slick. We saw one small school of dolphins and a few sea gulls. But that was about it.

I began to wonder, then, where have all the wildlife gone?

Are most of the birds already dead from the oil, their carcasses at the bottom of the sea?

Are some species smart enough to sense the deadly stew of oil and chemical dispersants and move inland?

Or are contractors hired by BP out there working the beaches at night, collecting dead animals and not reporting them, so the tourists won’t have to see them in the morning and the company may escape some liability in this multi-billion dollar disaster?

According to official estimates, about a half a million birds died in the area around Prince William Sound, Alaska in 1989, when 11 million gallons of oil spilled into the sea from the Exxon Valdez super tanker.

Yet as of July 4, two months and two weeks after the Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank into the Gulf of Mexico, the official government report on dead wildlife in the Gulf from BP’s oil spill only records the collection of 2,289 birds, 1,359 dead and 930 alive. Only 408 have been released alive, even though experts acknowledge many of those will not survive the trauma.

The official report shows only 598 sea turtles found, 442 of those dead, 156 alive. Only three have been released alive.

The same report shows only 58 mammals, mostly dolphins, have been reported. Of those, 53 were dead and five were found alive. Only one has been released alive.

“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” according to Birders United. “Scientists estimate that only 10 percent of oil-soaked birds are ever found. Most of the oil-soaked bird carcasses sink to the bottom of the sea.”

This information is not just important for animal lovers and tree huggers.

Under the Oil Pollution Act, passed in 1990 in the wake of the Valdez spill, a Natural Resource Damage Assessment was established by law to determine the type and amount of restoration needed to compensate the public for harm to natural resources, along with their human uses, that occur as a result of an oil spill.

While it is still too early in the process to know what the scope of the assessment will be, from past experience, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is concerned about impacts to fish, shellfish, marine mammals, turtles, birds and other sensitive resources as well as their habitats, including wetlands, beaches, mudflats, bottom sediments, coral reefs — and the water column itself.

A group of trustees established by the law are charged with assessing not only the loss of wildlife with an official inventory, but any lost human uses of these resources for fishing, hunting and beach recreational closures.

In other words, a number of scientists are puzzling over these same questions every day as part of their jobs. But so far, there are not many answers.

To make matters worse, until the Deepwater Horizon well is plugged once and for all, maybe sometime in August when a relief well finally reaches the depth of a mile below the sea, the impacts of the oil on wildlife will continue unabated.

There are three chief concerns for birds, according to experts. There is the immediate threat to individual birds from oil contamination. Many birds could be killed but never collected, particularly ‘plunge-diving’ birds such as pelicans, gannets and terns.

The second is from reduced food availability due to contamination of seafood stocks.

Third is from oil impacts to bird habitat. The long-term effects on birds will be decreased breeding success as nests fail due to contamination of eggs that come into contact with oil and due to birds being forced from contaminated areas to marginal breeding sites or sites that are already at maximum capacity.

One of the experts asking these same questions is marine biologist John Hocevar, who lives in Takoma Park, Maryland and works for the environmental group Greenpeace.

When I asked him the question, “where have all the wildlife gone,” he said, “That is the big question.”

Greenpeace has received numerous reports from local groups that BP contractors are burying dead birds, turtles and fish while cleaning the beaches at night. Three sources have told me the same thing, but so far, even though Greenpeace has checked out a number of reports, no one has caught BP illegally dumping or burying dead animals.

Mike Reynolds, the head of the Share the Beach volunteer group in Gulf Shores that helps monitor sea turtle nests this time of year, said he does not believe it is going on in his area. While the group in the past would sometimes bury dead turtles on the beach, due to the spill and the legalities involved, now any dead animal they find is placed in an evidence bag and turned in.

“If I caught a BP contract worker burying a dead animal, I would call the FBI,” Reynolds said. “That’s a $100,000 fine.”

But if the count is not being lowballed and green washed by BP, Hocevar wonders what is going on.

When I interviewed him last week, he had just watched the aerial video produced by Alabama’s John Wathen, which showed about 100 dolphins and one sperm whale under severe stress, some of the dolphins already floating dead in the oil slick on the surface of the Gulf.

Such documentary evidence should be counted, Hocevar said, not just the dead carcasses turned into authorities in evidence bags.

He also indicated that top of the line species such as dolphins, sea turtles and birds should not be the only indicators. On a recent trip to the Gulf coast himself, Hocevar saw maybe 25,000 dead hermit crabs in one small area, along with thousands of sea cucumbers, all food for wildlife that will not be there in the future.

Should BP’s liability include loss of future wildlife as well as animals found dead as a result of the spill?

When Hocevar watched President Barack Obama on his recent trip to the coast say the Gulf will be made whole and come back “better than before,” he said, “It made me furious.”

This largest of environmental disasters will no doubt ruin parts of the Gulf, he said.

“It may not entirely kill off the Gulf of Mexico,” he said. “But some things will never be the same.”

He said this spill will inevitably cause extinctions of some already endangered species, if not all directly from exposure to oil, then through the loss of habitat like dead marshes and the impacted sea floor, where the oil and chemicals are sinking and killing algae and other microorganisms that every species depends upon for spawning and survival.

“It will effect the entire food chain,” he said. “There will be significant effects on breeding birds and fish.”

In the deepwater areas off the Continental Shelf, where the Deepwater Horizon rig itself was located, there will be devastating effects on already endangered blue fin tuna, as well as red fish, Spanish mackerel, and royal red shrimp. Inland, the spill will harm the spawning grounds of not just white, pink and brown shrimp, but also blue crab “and many other species.”

Kelly Reetz, the naturalist for Gulf State Park, confirmed that she has not been seeing the sanderlings and plovers on the beach lately. She has also noticed diminished flocks of laughing gulls. But she can’t explain where they have all gone.

Some are most likely dead already, she said, but some have moved inland.

Some of these species, as well as the great blue herons, green herons and ospreys can adapt and eat mullet and other fish from brackish and fresh water lakes and streams inland from the Gulf, so some flocks may be moving up to Weeks Bay and Wolf Bay, she said.

She does not expect to see a huge effect from the spill on migrating song birds, which will be collecting soon on the shores for their trans-Gulf migration.

The sea turtles are another story entirely, she indicated, so she is taking part in helping to move the entire population of nesting sea turtles from the Gulf coast to the Atlantic coast.

Any baby turtle that emerges from a Gulf beach nest in the nest few weeks would inevitably be doomed by the oil, she said, since the sargassum seaweed they depend upon for their already precarious survival collects oil like a magnet.

That is why the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service have come up with a plan to move every single sea turtle egg they can identify from the Gulf coast to the Atlantic coast in the next few weeks.

The eggs from identified nests will be individually packed in specially prepared styrofoam boxes and transported by specially equipped ground transportation to a secure, climate-controlled location on the east central coast of Florida, where they will remain until incubation is complete.

Sandy MacPherson, the national sea turtle coordinator for the Fish and Wildlife Service, said most nests are laid by loggerheads sea turtles, although there are also a few Kemp’s ridley nests, leatherbacks and green turtles.

“In developing this plan we realized early on that our expectations for success needed to be realistic,” MacPherson said. “On the one hand the activities identified in the protocols are extraordinary and would never be supportable under normal conditions. However, taking no action would likely result in the loss of all of this year’s Northern Gulf of Mexico hatchlings.”

The plan applies to nests deposited on the Florida Panhandle and Alabama beaches during the 2010 nesting season.

“As hatchlings emerge they will be released on east central Florida beaches where they will be allowed to make their way to the ocean,” said Barbara Schroeder, NOAA Fisheries national sea turtle coordinator.

As for the brown pelicans hanging on for dear life on what’s left of the barrier islands of Barataria Bay, Hocevar said many of them will not make it and that species could very well end up on the Endangered Species List again.

“The Gulf will not come back completely,” Hocevar said. “Not in our lifetimes.”

Glynn Wilson

A lone great blue heron, with oil coating his legs, still looking for fish in the blocked off Little Lagoon pass on West Beach in Gulf Shores, Alabama

Click here to see a photo essay from Barataria Bay

Tags: Is BP Green Washing the Dead Wildlife Count?, Where Oh Where Have All the Wildlife Gone?

This entry was posted on Monday, July 5th, 2010 at 2:06 pm and is filed under BP Oil Spill, Environment News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.