Rescuing oiled birds: Poignant but futile?

Associated Press

FORT JACKSON, La.

Inside a warehouse-turned-refugee encampment for animals soaked with oil, rescue teams wash acrid goo from the matted feathers of brown pelicans and other seabirds and try to nurse them to health.

Wildlife-rescue organizations have carried out this mercy mission after many oil spills in recent decades, hoping to save as many creatures as possible. Of all the efforts by all the workers and volunteers responding now to the nation’s worst offshore spill, the attempts to cleanse these animals and set them free tug hardest on the heartstrings.

Even if the results are up for debate.

Critics call bird-washing a wasteful exercise in feel-good futility that simply buys doomed creatures a bit more time. They say the money and man-hours would be better spent restoring wildlife habitat or saving endangered species.

In the seven weeks since oil began erupting from a mile-deep well after a drilling-rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, more than 150 pelicans, gulls, sandwich terns and other birds have been treated at a rehabilitation center 70 miles south of New Orleans.

A total of 442 birds in the Gulf region have been collected alive with visible oil; 109 oiled birds have been found dead. More are on the way, as oil slicks assault beaches and marshes that serve as breeding areas for many species.

The victims are scrubbed clean and held a week or more to recover. Then a Coast Guard plane flies them to Tampa Bay in Florida for release — far enough away, workers hope, that the birds won’t return to oiled waters and get soaked again. Birds treated from this disaster have been tagged, and none has been spotted in oil again.

It’s all part of a broader animal- care initiative overseen by federal agencies and operated largely by nonprofit groups, with funding from BP PLC. Other centers focus on turtles and marine mammals.

“All of us here taking care of the wildlife feel it’s important,” said Rhonda Murgatroyd of Wildlife Response Services in Houma, La. “We can’t just leave them there — somebody has to take care of them.”

A noble sentiment, said Ron Kendall, director of the Institute of Environmental and Human Health at Texas Tech University. But the hard reality is that many, if not most, oiled creatures probably won’t live long after being cleansed and freed, he said.

“Some species might tolerate it better than others,” he said, “but when you compare the benefits to the costs ... I am skeptical.”

The arm of the federal government that nominally oversees offshore rigs agrees with Kendall and has for some time.

“Studies are indicating that rescue and cleaning of oiled birds makes no effective contribution to conservation, except conceivably for species with a small world population,” the U.S. Minerals Management Service said in a 2002 environmental analysis of proposed Gulf oil drilling projects.