Oil spill update from the field: The pelican dilemma, saving mom may mean killing chicks
Audubon's David Ringer glumly examines one of the oiled Cat Bay pelican colonies. (Photo by Justin Nobel/Audubon Magazine)
Cat Bay, Louisiana, May 26
We depart from under a concrete compound on stilts and speed into what looks like the apocalypse. A tattered fleet of shrimp boats plies the water, arms akimbo, but rather than nets dangles boom used to soak oil. The slick has stained sterns black, and oil is splashed upon sides, as if the boats had been doing battle with giant petroleum spewing sea monsters. Audubon Magazine photo editor Kim Hubbard and I, along with a Times-Picayune newsman are headed for a chain of tiny mangrove islands loaded with breeding brown pelicans and laughing gulls. In the past week oil has sullied their shores, painting mangroves and marsh grass black and slathering birds in oil. At least one pelican is on death’s doorstep and a wildlife crew has been dispatched to save it. We have been dispatched to document the rescue attempt.
“Unfortunately right where we’re headed it’s starting to rain hard, even hailing a little bit; and they saw a waterspout,” says Mike Carloss, a Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries biologist and our guide.
Just two days ago, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal visited these islands, in Barataria Bay, more than 100 miles from the leaking Deepwater wellhead and found oiled adult pelicans and eggs smeared with oil. The scene is one of the most heart wrenching since the spill began. Brown pelicans are the Louisiana state bird but by 1963, thanks to the pesticide DDT, there was not a single nesting pair left in the state. A massive rehabilitation program introduced juvenile birds from Florida and through the 1980s and 1990s, populations flourished. Last year, the birds were removed from the endangered species list and there are presently about 10,000 breeding pairs in Louisiana, according to Carloss, spread out amongst six to eight main colonies. But the spill has put nearly all of them in jeopardy. Carloss is their keeper; he fed some of the state’s first reintroduced pelicans by hand as a teenager and has witnessed the whole arc of their comeback. Now he may witness their downfall.
“It’s like a bad dream that won’t end,” he says.
Rain drops become hail pellets and lightning splits the sky, glassy seas turn choppy. The photographers seek shelter under our boats’ awning. Carloss asks us if we want to continue—yes! As we near the islands, rains suddenly cease, a rainbow forms and the pungent smell of pelican invades the nostrils. The island is packed with birds; gulls and about 150 nesting pairs of pelicans but also roseate spoonbill, yellow crowned night heron and ibis. Gulls line the muddy shore and pelicans come and go from mangrove nests, dive bombing for fish in the sea beyond and returning with bounty in their beak. The scene seems perfect, but the shoreline the gulls roam is etched in oil and the waters where the pelicans feed are specked with small patches of slick. Onshore, oiled pelicans continuously preen themselves, a futile attempt to remove the goop and smooth out their feathers, which form a protective shield that keeps birds dry and warm. Birds can become so obsessed with trying to remove the oil that they forget about hunting and starve to death.
Stuck with fishing line to a gnarled mangrove is the dying pelican. Its saviors are in white suits, walking slowly towards it through oil-soaked muck. As the men near, hundreds of birds abandon their nests and dart into the sky. This is one reason why Carloss and his team have been so reluctant to retrieve oiled pelicans in colonies. Their intrusion upsets nesting birds but pulling an adult pelican off a nest can also put its young at risk. With a parent gone, one bird must both hunt and protect the young while food is being gathered, clearly an impossible task. But of course an oiled parent puts the young at risk too. No scientific formula exists for just when to go in and rescue an oiled adult that is nesting, and when to let it be, but Carloss and his team are working hard on creating one. “This is one of those times,” says Carloss, “You just do your best and try and figure something out.”
The snared pelican is nabbed and placed in a cardboard box. The fishing line has cut its leg bad but the bird is only slightly oiled. After an inspection back on land it will either be released later today or brought to the Oiled Wildlife Rehab Center, in Fort Jackson. This bird may live but Carloss worries that given the vast squiggly stretch of Louisiana coast affected by the spill, many birds may be dying without getting noticed. And pelicans are the easy ones to spot. Birds like least bitterns and clapper rails live deep in the cane grass that cloaks the mouth of the Mississippi like a jungle. Right now, the area is getting slammed with oil.
“There’s still a lot of oil roaming around out there in the Gulf,” says Carloss. “What we’re seeing here is just the little fingers.”