A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [36]
In the Gulf in May, with the oil gushing, are loons, gannets, various kinds of herons and others that have spent the winter here but will soon leave to migrate north. Depending on the species, they’ll breed all along the coast from the southern states to as far north as the Maritimes and lakes across much of Canada. Some of the longest-distance migrants on Earth are various sandpipers, plovers, and other shorebirds, many of which winter as far south as Patagonia and breed as far north as the high Arctic. Perhaps a million cross the Gulf in May, and when they reach the U.S. coastline, they must stop to rest and feed. Problems with habitat and food supply have reduced many of their populations 50 to 80 percent in the last twenty years. And now this.
Oil is just starting to smudge some of the birds. Even among those that do not get heavily oiled, some will not make it. The birds’ energy budgets will not bear the cost of feathers sticking and functioning inefficiently, and many such birds will likely drop out on their way north. Migrating peregrine falcons traveling north from South American wintering areas, destined for nesting sites as far as Greenland, are also crossing the Gulf’s marshes. Preferentially picking off birds whose flight seems compromised, falcons could end up getting disproportional doses of oil.
Certain animals that normally inhabit the open Atlantic travel to the Gulf to breed. The world’s most endangered sea turtle, the Kemp’s ridley, ranges throughout the western Atlantic as far north as New England. But it breeds only in the Gulf. Adults are now heading there to lay their eggs on remote beaches. So are other sea turtles. Adults are vulnerable, but hatchlings will likely have an even harder time. And whether from oil or fishing nets, disproportionate numbers of turtles continue turning up dead.
A magnificent frigatebird—that’s not my description; it’s the species’ name: magnificent frigatebird—patrols overhead. It shares the airspace with a couple of helicopters and a C-130 military cargo plane, newcomers in its eons-old realm. And it feels the place more deeply than anyone aboard those aircraft.
Booms designed to keep away oil have been placed along one side of Freemason Island. But they don’t run the whole length of even one side of the island. And on the side where they were placed, the wind and chop have already washed them ashore in places and partly buried them in sand and shell. In other words, segments of the boom barrier have already been rendered useless by a couple of days’ wave action.
We’d had some news that part of the oil slick was eight miles southeast of the islands in the open Gulf. But the water is too rough for us to continue on to the main Chandeleur Islands or beyond. Indeed, some of the fishing boats carrying booms are headed back in. Over the radio they tell us they were sent toward port due to the rough water.
So far, I see oil only on the heads and bellies of a few Sandwich terns. Just a few little brown smudges; but it’s unmistakably oil. I fear much worse is coming. Diving into water—that’s how they eat. Oil is famously hazardous to waterbirds. It’s a chronic thing: a few oiled birds are always showing up around harbors and ports, and I once saw a tropicbird in the middle of the ocean whose immaculate pearl plumage was stained with considerable oil from somewhere—probably a ship that had discharged dirty bilgewater.
People have been counting dead birds from major spills for years. In 1936, 1,400 oiled birds washed ashore near Kent, England. In 1937, a ship collision sent 6,600 oiled birds onto the coastline of California. Five thousand ducks on the East Coast in a 1942 mishap; 10,000 ducks killed by oil in the Detroit River in 1948; an estimated 150,000 eiders off Chatham, Massachusetts, after two ships collided in a 1952 winter gale; 30,000 ducks off Gotland, in the Baltic, in 1952, and 60,000 more in the same place in three successive spills over the next four years. In 1955 the wreck of the Gerd Maersk killed