My last day working on the Dubai Star Wildlife Response was spent processing dead birds with Diana Humple.  I first met Diana during the 2002 Luchenbach oiled wildlife response.  She works for PRBO Conservation Science (www.prbo.org ), which is one of our response member organizations.  During most responses she leads the processing team, collecting and securing evidence and vital data that is used for impact assessment and our reponse efforts.  Most often volunteers don’t have the opportunity to work with her because the work she performs is done in the necropsy room. Although I was working with dead birds it was a nice way to spend my last day of the response .  Diana taught me some new species identification tips and more importantly our time spent together reminded me of all of the different people and processes that make oild wildlife response efforts effective.  Laundry, search and collection, animal care, volunteer cordination, intake , cleaning cages, logistics, processing, networking,  coot wrangling, There are many unseen and unsung heros during our response efforts. Thank You Volunteers & Staff! ~ January     Summary of Dubai Star Wildlife Response Animal Numbers Birds Mammals # Released 28 0 # Died / Euthanized 19 0 # In care at SFBOWCEC 2 0 Total live collected from field 49 0 Total dead collected from field 21 0

Removal of the Brown Pelican from the Federal List

Last week, during the Dubai Star spill, I got call of a dead, possibly oiled Brown Pelican on the shoreline of Bay Farm Island that I went out and collected.  While depressing to find such a big, beautiful bird dead, possibly because of this oil spill, it was good news in the background that kept things in perspective.

It is not every day a species get removed from the Federal List of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife.  On November 11 2009, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced that the Brown Pelican, a species almost brought to extinction by the pesticide DDT, is being removed from the list of threatened and endangered species under the Endangered Species Act because its populations have rebounded.

You can read more about it at:

http://www.fws.gov/home/feature/2009/pdf/brownpelicanfinaldelisting11-10-09_to_OFR.pdf

The delisting under “Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants; Removal of the Brown Pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis) From the Federal List of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife” is dry but fascinating reading.

More entertaining is this picture that photographer Tom Grey took of the Brown Pelican in its full, glorious beauty.

This picture always reminds me of the limerick by Dixon Lanier Merritt:

A Wonderful Bird Is The Pelican
His Bill Will Hold More Than His Belican.
He Can Take In His Beak
Food Enough For A Week,
But I’m Damned If I See How The Helican.

Let’s hear it for the Brown Pelican.

Gone birding this next week.  Happy Thanksgiving.

- Nils

Final days of the Dubai Star wildlife response

While Friday was the last official day of wildlife response for the Dubai Star oil spill, we are still dealing with remnants of the spill.  Yesterday, a birder in the East Bay reported a possible oiled male Surf Scoter.  The scoter was seen sitting up on the rocks on a small island just off from the San Leandro Marina, south of the Oakland airport.

Today, IBRRC’s Harv Wilson went over to the marina to check and see if the bird was still there – it was.  After talking with Harv and Laird Henkel, the wildlife branch director on this spill from OSPR, we decided that I would drive down from Davis and assist Harv in a possible boat rescue.  We would kayak out to the island with one person coming from behind the bird with a dip net and one person approaching with a boat from the front.

Typically, these are hard capture attempts since the bird has a number of places to escape to, but today all things worked out well.  We spotted the bird hunkered down up on the rocky shoreline, and after I kayaked over to the island I approached the bird from behind and dropped the dip net over it before it could get to the water (where Harv was waiting).   As you can see from the picture, the male Surf Scoter is a beautiful creature.

I drove the scoter up to the Cordelia facility where I looked at it more closely with Jay Halcomb.  While the scoter acted like it was oiled, we failed to find any evidence of oil on it.  The bird is skinny and lethargic so perhaps it is fighting some kind of illness.  It will get rehabilitated and hopefully released before too long.

- Nils

Demobilized: A Love Letter to My Office

Dear Office,

When I first started working at the OWCN I never fully appreciated our time together. My attention was divided. I was often thinking of I what would be doing while away from you and working a response. However, after this recent spill I understand how important you are to me.

Granted, being away from you was exciting. Each day I was gone I was dashing around the facility, making phone calls and working with pre-trained volunteers and staff members. And now that I’m back with you, my days have been filled with routine activities like combing through receipts, reviewing forgotten “to-do” lists, and the time intensive process of reading and responding to emails that have piled up in the past week. Although being with you and performing these tasks may not seem as exciting as my time away from you, I have a new appreciation for these days with you.

After working this spill I understand that the work done with you is just as important as the work I do while away from you during a spill response. It’s the time that I spend with you that allows me to immediately jump into the action. Yes, it took an oil spill for me to really see how much you mean to me, but I see it now. Thank you so much for each day we spend together.

Much affection,

Kaiti

My home away from home.

Day 15: SFBOWCEC

Kaiti blogged earlier this week on the loss of time phenomenon that occurs during oil spills.  There is also a little-known warpage in time that occurs at the end of a spill where even the most simple tasks seem to flit through your memory when you really (now) should have the time (and attention) to deal with them.  This tends to begin to occur once animal care day length gets below 10 hrs/day, and is particularly afflictive to those personnel responsible for electronic communications.  That would be me.  And that would be my long-winded way of apologizing for not blogging on facilities issues over the past several days. And, lastly, I can visualize both Kaiti and Alison rolling their eyes at this lengthy intro, as well as Dr. Massey for my far-too-long and over-elaborate sentence structure.  Right, on to the birds…

Things here at the SFBOWCEC are going very well.  We had a “coot wrangling” session yesterday where we fished out each of the coots from our SPAs (small pool aviaries, officially named by our resident acronym guru Don), did full physical exams and blood work, and assessed their waterproofing and any skin burns.  Based on this, we will be able to release 11 of the remaining 16 coots this afternoon.  We will also be releasing one of the remaining two scoters and most (if not all) of the dunlin.  Once this release is completed, we will have released more that 50% of the live birds captured during this event – a significant accomplishment considering the presence of skin burns from the product.  We will most likely have just a handful of birds remaining this afternoon, and I will be speaking with Jay Holcomb of IBRRC to determine the feasibility of rolling these birds into the general rehabilitation operations of our partners here (as the number of algae-slimed birds IBRRC has in-house is also down).  We will most likely be assessing these remaining birds again either Monday or Tuesday to see if their ongoing problems have resolved with some additional “room and board, plus good groceries” time.

Lastly, some numbers: Of the 49 live birds we have collected, we have released 10 (plus an anticipated 15 this afternoon) and 17 have died or been humanely euthanized.  To date, 20 dead birds have been collected by our field teams.  Considering the condition that the birds came in at (shown by some “before” and “after” pictures below), we are very happy with the results!

- Mike

Before: Oiled American coot on intake

 

After: Horned and Western grebes in pool

 

 

 

Day 13 of Dubai Star Oil Spill – Report from the field

I missed blogging yesterday since that was a packing day for me.  Don and I hauled our boat and the Rat Rig back to Davis while Phil and Harv continued searching for dead and alive oiled birds.  They did not find anything new yesterday and it seems like things are really slowing down.

Today, Phil and Harv were out and the first thing that they did was help on a capture of the Endangered Clapper Rail that persists in small numbers here in San Francisco Bay, among other places in California.  A rail was reported as being oiled, so we had a team of expert rail biologists from US Geological Survey and US Fish and Wildlife Service come in and help us capture rails.  The rails are easy to catch on high tide for they congregate in small clumps of vegetation that do not flood out.  The team went out in small boats and quickly captured three Clapper Rails, two which were unoiled and one which had a smudge of oil on its tertial feathers.

The oiled feathers were clipped off, and the rail was radio-tagged (so we can see how well the bird survives over the next 6 weeks), banded and released with the other two rails.  At the end of six weeks, if all goes well, the rail will be recaptured and the radio tag will be removed.

The only other bird found today was a dead, oiled, depredated American Coot.  At this point, it looks like we will discontinue search efforts at the end of Friday.

- Nils

Release!

One of the perks of being the Director is having the ability to bump a regularly scheduled blog post on facility operations for gratuitous happy release images!!

We released our first batch of birds this afternoon (5 coots, 2 Western/Clark’s grebes, 1 eared grebe, 1 horned grebe and one greater scaup).  As you can see from these images, they were happy to get out of Dodge (or Fairfield – wherever works for you). January took two of our wonderful volunteers (Corinne Burchette and Sarah Warnock – yes, even family members get dragged into spills) down to Berkeley Marina, where they met up with Laird Henkel (DFG-OSPR) and Anne Ardillo (another super volunteer) for the event.

Our hope is to evaluate most of the remaining birds this coming Thursday for another release at the end of this week.  Stay tuned!

- Mike

Day 11 of Dubai Star Oil Spill – Report from the field

They are lurking in the bushes, slinking through the rip rap, and a problem for oiled birds.  Cats, both feral and house cats, seem to be extremely abundant around the shoreline of Alameda.  This morning at Crab Cove I spotted the cat pictured below searching through the rocks around where coots, Mallards, shorebirds,  and widgeon were feeding nearby.  The cat was well fed, not shy, and obviously someone’s pet but it was clearly hunting.  This is a real problem for the oiled birds that come ashore and also for the cat if it is eating birds with oil on them.  Over by the Elsie Roemer Marsh where the endangered Clapper Rail hangs on in small numbers, we have seen two to four cats hunting around the marsh edge.  With this kind of predator pressure from cats plus other predators like raccoons and corvids, distressed birds do not have much of a chance.

We spent the day looking for oiled birds to catch around Crown Beach and Bay Farm Island and despite our best efforts, the only birds that came in today were two dead birds – a freshly dead American Coot with no obvious oil on it and a desiccated Double Crested Cormorant .  Yvette and I packed up the Rat Rig and tomorrow Don will come and haul it back to Davis.  Duane headed home today after a long, productive stint helping catch birds while Phil and Harv will remain as the wandering R&T crew for at least the next couple of days.  Tomorrow I will head back to Davis; will be good to see my own bed and my family.

- Nils

Interview with OWCN Pre-trained Volunteer Jeanette Stone

A few days ago I had a moment to tape a couple of short interviews with some of the OWCN pre-trained volunteers who were participating in the response. Anyone who works in oiled wildlife response knows that we couldn’t do any of this without the generosity, hard work and dedication of the people who donate their time and energy to care for the affected animals. I’ll add these to the blog over the next few days when I have a moment to edit the clips. I apologize to those many other volunteers I didn’t have time to interview. You all deserve recognition and a great deal of thanks.

This interview was filmed while Jeannette had a short break in the wash room. There’s a lot of background noise, but hopefully you can hear her responses to my questions. By the way, please bear with the questions, I’m no Mike Wallace.

-Greg

done

Day 10: SFBOWCEC

I must apologize for not posting the past couple of days. As Kaiti has noted in her past entries, time gets away from you way too easily here. In fact, I’d forgotten to check the score of the Charger’s game yesterday and only found out they’d won when Mike called in the evening to see how things were going. Anyone who knows me knows it’s VERY unusual for me not to be on top of a Charger’s game.

So back to the update, we received two oiled coots on the 7th and one on the 8th. The two birds from the 7th were washed yesterday afternoon and are stable this morning. The bird admitted yesterday afternoon was caught in the morning and stabilized in the field before being transported. It was pretty obvious he’d already received some care because last night and this morning he was very active in his cage. His blood tests looked good so he’ll be washed this afternoon after being fed a few times this morning.

We’ve been doing pre-release exams on several of the birds today. I just saw the blood work and it’s looking like some of the birds will be returning to the wild in the very near future. We’ve been talking with the Wildlife Branch Director this morning. He’ll get the ball rolling to see about getting approval from the Unified Command and finding a safe and appropriate location for the release. We’ll make sure to keep you guys posted as things progress.

-Greg