Bay oil spill, bird migration make tragic mix

Too few workers are trained to stem the losses.

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

SAN FRANCISCO — As cleanup crews struggle to pick up the oil that ebbs and flows in San Francisco Bay, wildlife experts worry about the 1.6 million shorebirds and waterfowl that come here every winter like clockwork for the good food and the mild climate.

Over the past week, since the Cosco Busan container ship hit the Bay Bridge and dumped 58,000 gallons of toxic bunker fuel oil into the bay, the deadly black goo has tarred thousands of birds and dozens of marine mammals. Fishing is shut down, and scientists are trying to assess the immediate and long-term effects of petroleum in a fragile ecosystem.

Nearly 1,500 birds have been picked up dead or alive, including rare seabirds and coastal dwellers, tiny marbled murrelets and snowy plovers.

Yet thousands more birds and ducks have been splashed with globs of oil and rainbow sheen but remain in the wild where they will probably die, experts say. Birds that fly on farther south for the winter, yet stop on the popular Pacific Flyway to rest and eat, have moved on, carrying the contamination on their feathers.

“The oiled birds are everywhere,” said Rebecca Dmytryk, an International Bird Rescue Research Center worker on her way to plan a new capture of injured birds on Rodeo Beach in Marin County.

“Some of these birds have had oil on them for a week, and they’re dying,” she said.

The oil spill couldn’t have happened at a worse time for the 360,000 shorebirds that come to the bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta for the winter, to feed in the mudflats, in the lower tides and, at high tide, in the salt ponds.

The 700,000 waterfowl, which include ducks, grebes and loons, like the open ocean and deep bay where they can spend most of their time in the water, diving or dabbling. Additionally, about 300,000 seabirds and Western gulls will be breeding at the Farallon Islands come spring. Some of the murres are already showing up to start courtship at the islands, the largest seabird colony south of Alaska.

“San Francisco Bay just dwarfs all the other estuaries on the Pacific Coast,” said W. David Shuford, a wetlands biologist at PRBO (originally called Point Reyes Bird Observatory), the Petaluma science center that has monitored Farallones wildlife for four decades.

“The estuary size, the diversity of the habitat, the flow of fresh water and the mild climate all come together to support large numbers of birds,” he said. A lesson learned from the Cosco Busan spill is that the number of trained personnel falls short of what’s needed to save birds.

Birds aren’t the only spill victims. Sea lions and harbor seals have also been exposed to the bunker fuel oil, floating and coating stretches of the bay and coast.

A week ago, 37 of the 244 sea lions counted at Pier 39 in San Francisco were oiled, biologists report.