(Transcript of For the Birds, June 8, 2010)
My godfather, my Uncle Dick, was a sweet, sentimental Chicago firefighter who took pride in being 100 percent Irish. I spent my adult life living pretty far from Chicago, so I saw him mostly at weddings and funerals, which were numerous in our big family. Uncle Dick and I gravitated to each other because we were both rather quiet and both loved telling each other about our outdoors adventures. Dick was an avid fisherman his whole life. As a young man, he was also an avid hunter, but he’d put away his guns for good when he was in his twenties. Late in the evenings at our family gatherings, after he’d been drinking for a few hours and was in the weepy stage, he’d always tell me, as if for the first time, about the day he stopped hunting. He was out with a buddy and shot a Mallard hen. When the dog brought back the duck, Dick saw that she was still alive. He held her in his hands as he felt her breathing ebb and watched the light in her eyes go out. He couldn’t bring himself to eat her—he gave her and his gun to his buddy and never hunted again. But as if he needed to justify his continued fishing, he’d always say, “Fish are cold-blooded, Laura. I mean, really—they eat their young!”
Dick always had to reach a certain point in his drinking to tell me this story. And each time he told it to me, tears leaking into his beer mug, he emphasized how long it took that duck to die—and how he could see in the bird’s eyes that she was suffering, but just couldn’t bring himself to squeeze the life out of her. I don’t know which he felt guiltier about—shooting her in the first place or not being able to put an end to her suffering. Dick had rescued babies and children as a firefighter, and had pulled their dead bodies out of buildings, too—I think he’d felt the precariousness of life too often in his hands to use them so directly to squeeze the life out of even a duck. I stayed with him for a few weeks while he was dying of lung cancer from fighting all those fires. Even at the end, this dear tenderhearted man still felt guilty about the suffering he’d caused a duck.
When I took my first ornithology course, I read with horror about physiological studies done on animals in earlier decades, by scientists with more clinical detachment than my Uncle Dick or I could ever have mustered. In some laboratory experiments, Mallards, which aren’t even diving ducks, have lived as long as 16 minutes while held underwater, and remained alive as long as 27 minutes after their tracheas were clamped shut. In exsanguination studies, scientists have literally drained 1 percent of an animal’s blood every hour—the equivalent of draining a little more than one pint of blood from a 100-pound human being every hour. They learned that birds can lose much more of their body’s blood volume without going into shock than mammals can—pigeons can lose that volume every hour for 9 hours before dying. I wonder if those scientists watched the light ebb from their subjects’ eyes as they were recording the exact time of their deaths.
I’ve been thinking a lot about these gruesome studies and about my Uncle Dick as I’ve watched coverage of the millions of gallons of oil gushing in the Gulf of Mexico. A few news accounts have referred to “oiled feathers,” but the birds I’m seeing have oil gunking up their eyes, oil seeping into their nostrils and mouths and ears. I was just in Savannah, Georgia, last week watching Brown Pelicans plunging from great heights into the ocean—the way they’re adapted to catching fish—and felt sick thinking about the pelicans in the Gulf. Bewildered, suffering, but dying slowly, as birds do. Who from BP, Transocean Ltd., which owned the Deepwater Horizon rig leased to BP, and Halliburton, the contractor involved in cementing the well, is witnessing the light going out in these birds’ eyes? When a team from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology found an oiled but still-living pelican along with an oil-drenched Snowy Egret carcass, they called the BP wildlife rescue team, which took 90 minutes to arrive, and probably at least another hour to get it to their facility. These facilities can’t be everywhere along the coast, of course, but at times like these, I wonder how merciful it is that birds die so slowly.
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Monday, June 7, 2010
Oil Hemorrhaging from the Gulf
Transcript of today's For the Birds:
Oil Hemorrhage
On April 20, an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 people outright, injured others, and sent oil hemorrhaging into the sea from the drill site. This happened two days before Earth Day, and four days before the 21st anniversary of the day the Exxon Valdez, a single-hulled oil tanker, crashed into Prince William Sound, spilling at least 10.8 million gallons of oil into what had been pristine waters. The Valdez was carrying over 55 million gallons of oil, and although the 10.8 million gallon figure determined Exxon’s liability, Defenders of Wildlife claims that significantly more that that was actually spilled. Either way, Exxon’s spill has almost always been cited as the biggest environmental disaster in U.S. history until now. Shipping disasters and oil rig blowouts have happened many times before. Both these American disasters were predictable, and both were preventable.
Two and a half years before the Valdez crash, on Dec. 15, 1976, in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts, the Argo Merchant ran aground and broke apart southeast of Nantucket Island, spilling its entire cargo of 7.7 million gallons of fuel oil. We’d long known that so much oil being carried in a single-hull tanker was at huge risk of being released into the oceans, and over 100 countries have since banned the use of single-hull tankers in their waters, but the U.S.’s response was to continue to allow their use until 2015—and despite the sinking of the Valdez, Exxon continues to use these vulnerable ships even now, saving a relatively tiny amount of money to remain the richest corporation in the universe.
In April, 1977, the blowout of a well in an oil field in the Norwegian waters of the North Sea, leaked 81 million gallons. In response, Norwegians now impose strict standards for safety on these rigs. In 1979, another oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, Ixtoc 1, blew out, gushing an estimated 140 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf. This rig was operated by Mexico, so even though oil reached the Texas shore and affected American fisherman and killed birds that spend part of their lives in the United States along with fish and wildlife that swim in our waters, the oil industry and our official accounts never include this as an American disaster. The oil industry claims that the environmental effects were minimal, bizarre evidence that we’re willing to take the word of the oil industry whenever they manage to hide the damage that they do from the American media.
The term “oil spill” is so deeply entrenched in our jargon that it’s usually the term being used to describe what is happening in the Gulf today. The Exxon Valdez ship, huge as it was, held a finite amount of oil. The oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico each day now isn’t from the contents of a ship—it’s hemorrhaging from an undersea oil bed, and no one has any idea how much will gush out before the well is stopped. Even compared to Ixtoc 1, BP’s blowout has easily become the hugest environmental disaster in U.S. history.
Our birds—some of the species we northlanders hold especially dear, including hummingbirds, orioles, tanagers, and warblers—migrate over the open waters of the Gulf or along the shoreline en route to and from their tropical wintering grounds. One hundred percent of the wild migratory Whooping Cranes—both the ones that breed in Canada and the ones introduced in Wisconsin and taught to migrate by following an Ultralight aircraft—winter along the Gulf and depend for their survival on blue crabs. And right now huge numbers of birds, from enormous Brown Pelicans to tiny shorebirds, are dead or dying. Yet BP, the criminally negligent company that caused this gusher in the first place, has been preventing wildlife rehabbers, including their own volunteers, from getting access to the vast majority of oiled birds, and the Obama administration is still allowing them to call the shots. When the explosion occurred, I was too numb to speak out about it. But no longer. This week For the Birds will highlight what is happening in the Gulf, with accounts by ornithologists and bird rehabbers about the devastation to birds it is already causing, how much worse the situation will grow as fall migration and hurricane season kick in, and how this horrifying disaster will affect northland birds for years to come.
Oil Hemorrhage
On April 20, an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 people outright, injured others, and sent oil hemorrhaging into the sea from the drill site. This happened two days before Earth Day, and four days before the 21st anniversary of the day the Exxon Valdez, a single-hulled oil tanker, crashed into Prince William Sound, spilling at least 10.8 million gallons of oil into what had been pristine waters. The Valdez was carrying over 55 million gallons of oil, and although the 10.8 million gallon figure determined Exxon’s liability, Defenders of Wildlife claims that significantly more that that was actually spilled. Either way, Exxon’s spill has almost always been cited as the biggest environmental disaster in U.S. history until now. Shipping disasters and oil rig blowouts have happened many times before. Both these American disasters were predictable, and both were preventable.
Two and a half years before the Valdez crash, on Dec. 15, 1976, in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts, the Argo Merchant ran aground and broke apart southeast of Nantucket Island, spilling its entire cargo of 7.7 million gallons of fuel oil. We’d long known that so much oil being carried in a single-hull tanker was at huge risk of being released into the oceans, and over 100 countries have since banned the use of single-hull tankers in their waters, but the U.S.’s response was to continue to allow their use until 2015—and despite the sinking of the Valdez, Exxon continues to use these vulnerable ships even now, saving a relatively tiny amount of money to remain the richest corporation in the universe.
In April, 1977, the blowout of a well in an oil field in the Norwegian waters of the North Sea, leaked 81 million gallons. In response, Norwegians now impose strict standards for safety on these rigs. In 1979, another oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, Ixtoc 1, blew out, gushing an estimated 140 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf. This rig was operated by Mexico, so even though oil reached the Texas shore and affected American fisherman and killed birds that spend part of their lives in the United States along with fish and wildlife that swim in our waters, the oil industry and our official accounts never include this as an American disaster. The oil industry claims that the environmental effects were minimal, bizarre evidence that we’re willing to take the word of the oil industry whenever they manage to hide the damage that they do from the American media.
The term “oil spill” is so deeply entrenched in our jargon that it’s usually the term being used to describe what is happening in the Gulf today. The Exxon Valdez ship, huge as it was, held a finite amount of oil. The oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico each day now isn’t from the contents of a ship—it’s hemorrhaging from an undersea oil bed, and no one has any idea how much will gush out before the well is stopped. Even compared to Ixtoc 1, BP’s blowout has easily become the hugest environmental disaster in U.S. history.
Our birds—some of the species we northlanders hold especially dear, including hummingbirds, orioles, tanagers, and warblers—migrate over the open waters of the Gulf or along the shoreline en route to and from their tropical wintering grounds. One hundred percent of the wild migratory Whooping Cranes—both the ones that breed in Canada and the ones introduced in Wisconsin and taught to migrate by following an Ultralight aircraft—winter along the Gulf and depend for their survival on blue crabs. And right now huge numbers of birds, from enormous Brown Pelicans to tiny shorebirds, are dead or dying. Yet BP, the criminally negligent company that caused this gusher in the first place, has been preventing wildlife rehabbers, including their own volunteers, from getting access to the vast majority of oiled birds, and the Obama administration is still allowing them to call the shots. When the explosion occurred, I was too numb to speak out about it. But no longer. This week For the Birds will highlight what is happening in the Gulf, with accounts by ornithologists and bird rehabbers about the devastation to birds it is already causing, how much worse the situation will grow as fall migration and hurricane season kick in, and how this horrifying disaster will affect northland birds for years to come.
Friday, May 21, 2010
Chequamegon Bay Birding and Nature Festival!
Wow--so many birds already, and the weekend has barely begun! I came along on two kayaking trips led by Steve Hoecker today--what fun! Great looks at some shorebirds and other cool things, and a bunch of American Redstarts singing along our afternoon kayaking route. I didn't bring my good camera along, so this isn't one of "our" birds today, but who knows if any migrants passing through Ohio on May 6 are in northern Wisconsin today. We may get the kind of weather systems that bring in a huge migration this weekend--based on today's species, I'm thrilled about the possibilities tomorrow, when I'll be co-leading a field trip at Big Bay State Park.
I wonder...
...if this American Avocet that I saw at Wisconsin Point on May 2 is the same one hanging out in Ashland, Wisconsin? Steve Hoecker and I led a kayaking group in the bay today and had great looks at one. I do not trust myself enough in a kayak to have brought my good camera along, though, so no photos.
Monday, May 17, 2010
Biggest Week in American Birding!
This year I got to spend a paltry 5 days in the Magee Marsh in Ohio, during the beginning of the Biggest Week in American Birding. Next year I plan to stay for the entire 2-weekend 10-day event. I can't believe how close the warblers were, though not one person I encountered used recordings or even pished. I was there before the peak, so a handful of people were complaining that it wasn't "good" yet, but every moment was sheer joy for me.
There are a huge number of people filling the boardwalk, so it does get a little overwhelming. But I loved how the people were held to the boardwalk while the birds roamed about, and the way I figure, the more people who love warblers, the better the future for humans and warblers both.
There are a huge number of people filling the boardwalk, so it does get a little overwhelming. But I loved how the people were held to the boardwalk while the birds roamed about, and the way I figure, the more people who love warblers, the better the future for humans and warblers both.
Gee but it's great to be back home!
I haven't seen much of an actual migration wave since I've been home, but lots of warblers are back on territory in Port Wing and Duluth. My mother-in-law's neighborhood bears are still making an appearance despite her going out on her porch and yelling at them, and even firing bird shot at particularly persistent ones. I took a short walk along the Western Waterfront Trail Saturday morning, and a nice long walk with Photon in Port Wing yesterday, and everything feels so right.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
WOW!
People who spend a lot of time here at the Black Swamp Bird Observatory are complaining that the birds aren't as good as most years. But they're amazing! This Black-throated Green Warbler came in so close a guy got a decent photo with his cell phone!
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Oh, wow!
The "Biggest Week in American Birding" really lives up to its name! So far it's better than I imagined!
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Biggest Week in Birding!
I'm headed to Ohio's the Biggest Week In Birding today--well, getting as far as Chicago. Tomorrow I'll make it (FINALLY!!) to the Magee Marsh, where I've never been before, and will spend 5 days taking photos of birds. I don't care if it rains--those conditions are often amazing for warbler-watching. I'll have to figure out how to protect my camera, but if I don't get good photos, I'll be a blue-nosed gopher.
My camera, by the way, is named Annie, after Annie Sullivan, Helen Keller's teacher. I named her this because she's helping me to show the world how I perceive it.
My camera, by the way, is named Annie, after Annie Sullivan, Helen Keller's teacher. I named her this because she's helping me to show the world how I perceive it.
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