Loose Feathers #237

Piping Plover Chick / USFWS Photo

Birds and birding news

• Bald Eagles that have recolonized California's Channel Islands have had difficulty finding enough of their traditional food sources and have turned to scavenging seal carcasses and eating the islands' rare seabird and fox species instead. Both options present problems; seal blubber is laced with DDT, and the islands' rare species may be put at risk from additional predation.
• Forest fragmentation makes it easier for rat snakes to prey on nesting birds, leading to declines in forest breeding birds.
• A pelagic expedition near Jamaica failed to find any Jamaica Petrels, its target bird, but did find 46 Black-capped Petrels and several other unusual seabirds.
• A BBC film crew finally filmed a bittern booming during the day.
• EBird has a Gulf Coast Oil Spill Bird Tracker that they released as a Google gadget. You can contribute by surveying Gulf Coast marshes and entering your sightings into eBird.
• Logging in Tongass National Forest threatens the Alexander Archipelago wolf and the Queen Charlotte goshawk.

Birds in the blogosphere

• WorldWaders: Launching a multi-contributed blog on shorebirds
• Round Robin: Bad Place, Bad Timing for an Oil Spill 
• Great Auk or Greatest Auk: Why This Birder is Supporting the Arizona Boycott
• Wild Birds Unlimited: Dryer Lint is a NO NO for Nesting Material
• Birder's World Field of View: How Marie Read got the photos of Black Terns you can see in our June issue
• The Marvelous in Nature: Butterbutts
• Behind the Bins: Termite Hatchout

Environment and biodiversity

• Yesterday oil spilling from the former Deepwater Horizon rig drifted onto the Chandeleur Islands. Those islands and Breton Island are included in Breton National Wildlife Refuge, a refuge founded by Theodore Roosevelt. Meanwhile, the coffer dam arrived at the rig site and will be lowered over one of the leaks.
• Oil has been slow in reaching the shore partly because of weather conditions and partly because BP has sprayed a massive amount of dispersant into the oil slick. Dispersants break up a slick and cause the droplets of oil to sink deeper into the water column. Unfortunately this mix of oil and dispersant could be toxic for organisms that live underwater, including fish, oysters, and corals.
• We may be underestimating the effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill because most of its effects will be underwater. Also see part 2.
• The spill came at a particularly bad time (not that there is a good time for an oil spill!). Here is a photo gallery of ten species at risk from the spill.
• Last year, the Interior Department allowed the BP's offshore drilling operation to go forward without an environmental impact analysis, raising questions about Ken Salazar's leadership at Interior. Meanwhile, congressmen had complained about BP's safety record at their facilities in Alaska.
• American carbon dioxide emissions dropped in 2009 due to a poor economy.
• Yellow Fever mosquitos have evolved resistance to DEET.
• Childhood mortality and infertility in the Darwin-Wedgewood family may have been caused by inbreeding. Darwin himself suspected as much due to his studies of fertilization in plants.
• Ecological methods of mosquito control can equal or better pesticides in the quest to reduce deaths from malaria. When Oaxaca cleared brush around streams and homes, deaths from malaria dropped from more than 17,500 to 254 in four years. Mexico recorded no deaths from malaria in 2008.

Carnivals

• Scientia Pro Publica #28
• Circus of the Spineless #50
• Festival of the Trees #47
• Carnival of Evolution #22

An End in Sight to the Oil Leakage?

Gulf oil spill as of May 4 / NASA MODIS Rapid Response Team

Yesterday, BP announced that they had plugged the smallest of the three oil leaks in the broken riser pipe. Unfortunately, that will not reduce the amount of oil spilling from the well, but it eliminates one exit point. More importantly, one of the coffer dams has been completed and should be in place by Monday.

On Wednesday, the dome began its journey to the site of the ruptured well, where it will be lowered by cable 5,000 feet beneath the sea to sit atop the larger of the two remaining leaks.

The dome will not shut off the gushing well, which is still spilling an estimated 210,000 gallons of oil a day; the goal is just to keep some of the oil out of the water by capturing it and then funneling it to a drill ship, called the Discoverer Enterprise, waiting on the surface.

Think of the dome as an inverted cup gathering the gushing oil, and the drill pipe as a straw carrying it to the surface. If it sounds simple, it is not. Containment domes have been used in shallow water, but never at this depth.

The extreme depth of the well creates some challenges:

Despite the hopes placed on the big box, questions remain: Can it withstand the conditions nearly a mile beneath the sea? Will ice plug up the pipe? Will bad weather interrupt the work? Will the combination of gas, oil and water mix uneasily — or explosively — on the ship above? Add global scrutiny to the mix, and you have some anxious engineers....

BP engineers in Houston have sketched out models to account for what they expect to happen in this novel approach, along with several contingency plans. To combat the ice, which is likely to form as gas bubbles out of the oil, engineers will inject warm water along the pipe, and methanol into the oil.

If that sounds unclear, I would suggest checking this graphic, which shows how the containment chamber will work. The chamber should collect about 85% of the leaking oil if everything works as expected. It is unclear how soon the other 15% will be contained or how soon the well can be shut off.

I would like to suggest three other links on the spill that are worth checking out. The first is a description of flying over the spill area.

So that's it. The ocean is a rich emulsion blue here - different from the muddy brown closer to the mouth of the Mississippi - but suddenly we are seeing what this crisis in the Gulf of Mexico is all about. What we see first are like blemishes on the sea surface, slivers of an oily sheen that might almost be burn scars on skin.

But there are shades of catastrophe out here, obvious from our breezy, chilly perch (the doors of the chopper have been taken off). The "scars", some with the rainbow colours of peacock feathers, slowly give way to something more shocking.

Vast swathes of rust that at times turn almost Martian red.

The slick here looks like the deep cuts of the Grand Canyon, but painted on water. Striations of earth tones from vivid to dull. If the streaks of sheen pretend a certain beauty, this thicker, ruder stuff does not. It is vile; a terrible ruddy intrusion on a landscape that, but for us, should be virgin.

Here is a photo of a sea turtle struggling in that rusty mess. It was photographed by NWF activists who reported it to wildlife rescuers. When animals like that are rescued, they are taken to one of the rehabilitation centers for cleaning and feeding. Audubon has a description of how oiled birds are cleaned.

USFWS Revising Management Plan for Arctic NWR

Arctic National Wildlife Refuge / USFWS Photo

The US Fish and Wildlife Service is in the process of revising its management plan for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Issues they plan to address include the impact of drilling for oil in the refuge's coastal plain. and whether to designate more of the refuge as wilderness.

Although much of the focus of the hearing was on whether to allow oil and gas development in the coastal plain, Fish and Wildlife Service officials emphasized Tuesday that their aging refuge management plan needs updating regardless of the wilderness question. The last plan, completed in 1988, doesn't address a number of emerging issues at the refuge, including the effects of climate change.

The agency also said the old plan failed to take into account a state-federal subsistence management program or the opening to the public of the Dalton Highway, the primitive road that runs along the western edge of the refuge through Interior Alaska to the Prudhoe Bay oil fields.

Designating the coastal plain as wilderness would make future development unlikely.

If at the end of the two-year process the agency recommends adding wilderness or wild-and-scenic river designations, it would be up to the interior secretary to decide whether to recommend that Congress proceed with making them.

It's also up to Congress to determine how to handle the refuge's disputed coastal plain and whether to allow development there.

There's little precedent for retracting wilderness designations, so once an area achieves such a status and the president signs it into law by, it's all but permanent.

It seems an odd time to reconsider the development question since political support for expanded drilling is questionable at best. I find it difficult to imagine either expanded drilling or wilderness designation making it through Congress in the current political climate. The other questions are a bit more interesting, particularly the need to create a plan for dealing with climate change. As our northernmost refuge, Arctic could stand to be among the hardest hit.

Sea Turtles Not Dead from Oil

Dozens of sea turtles washed up dead on Mississippi beaches in the past week, but apparently oil did not kill them.

Moby Solangi, director of the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Gulfport, Miss., said Tuesday necropsies had been completed on the turtles and found no oil. Experts are still warning the turtles may have eaten fish contaminated by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Some wildlife officials say the turtles may have been killed by aggressive shrimpers trying to haul in catches before the oil potentially contaminates their fishing grounds.

Even if the turtles did not die directly from exposure to oil, their deaths could still be indirectly connected with the spill.

Updates on the Gulf Oil Spill

Oil Slick in the Gulf of Mexico on May 1, as seen by NASA's Terra ASTER

First, BP has built one of three coffer dams that it will try to use to collect leaking oil underwater.

BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said that the company had fashioned the first of three domes designed to be placed Tuesday "over the leak sources and allow us to collect the oil, funnel it up through pipework to a drill ship called Enterprise on the surface."

He added that the company expects "to load out the fabricated containment chamber tomorrow and we hope to have the system up and operating within a week." ...

Suttles admitted there would be "technical challenges" in trying to sink a 65-tonne structure down so deep, but said that despite the extreme pressure physics was to some extent in their favor.

"What allows this to work is the fact that oil is less dense than water and wants to float.

"Essentially an oil column exerts less pressure than a water column so that helps push the oil to the surface and we can assist that with other means."

This method was used to reduce the environmental damage from spills after Hurricane Katrina, but in much shallower water. Since this has not been tried with such a deep well, it is not known whether it will work. The link does not make clear what the timetable for the second and third containment chambers will be. A more permanent solution is to drill a relief well, but this is months away and similarly uncertain.

The Australian accident, known as the Montara spill, began Aug. 21 with a blowout of high-pressure oil similar to the one in the gulf. With the well spewing 17,000 to 85,000 gallons per day, precious weeks passed before the relief wells were started. When efforts got under way, the first four attempts — drilled on Oct. 6, 13, 17 and 24 — missed the original well.

A fifth attempt finally intersected the original on Nov. 1, and about 3,400 barrels of heavy mud were pumped through the relief well into the base of the original well. The spewing oil finally stopped Nov. 3 — more than 10 weeks after the original explosion.

BP intends to drill a similar relief well close to the site where the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig blew up and sank in the gulf nearly two weeks ago. The company says the well could take months to complete. In the meantime, the well continues to leak 210,000 gallons of oil a day, according to the latest official estimates.

BP's well in the Gulf of Mexico is at a much greater depth, which makes the plugging operation more difficult, but the seabed around BP's well is better mapped than the Montara well. In both operations, the goal is to hit a narrow shaft over a mile below the ocean floor. One additional connection between the two spills is that Halliburton did contract cement work shortly before each blowout.

Prior to Obama's announcement of expanded offshore drilling, NOAA warned that the Interior Department underestimated the risks of oil spills in its draft proposal.

NOAA complained that the draft report overstated the safety of offshore oil production by using information on frequency of spills from 1973 to 2004. NOAA pointed out there was a "substantial increase in spill volume in 2005, primarily due to spills associated with Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Some of the damaged rigs and pipelines damaged during the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons continue to have episodic releases, and repairs have not been fully completed."

Citing Interior's own data, NOAA scolded it for asserting that it had "been many years since any substantial environmental impacts have been observed as a result of an oil spill caused by the [Outer Continental Shelf] production and transportation activities."

NOAA also wrote that the administration's "analysis of the risk and impacts of accidental spills and chronic impacts are understated and generally not supported or referenced, using vague terms and phrases such as 'no substantive degradation is expected' and 'some marine mammals could be harmed.'"

So far relatively few oiled birds have been recovered, and the first is already cleaned and recuperating. In that case, the oiled gannet happened to swim up to a boat. It is possible that other seabirds are getting oiled and not making contact with people before dying since the slick is large and has mostly stayed away from land. When parts of the slick are burned, the smoke presents a potential threat to migratory songbirds flying over the gulf; songbirds that die from smoke inhalation over the Gulf might not be found.

Birds are not the only animals at risk. Since the Deepwater Horizon explosion, dozens of sea turtles have been washing up dead on Mississippi beaches. Necropsies will be necessary to determine whether their deaths are connected with the spill.

Finally, Paul Krugman writes that the oil spill in the Gulf could rejuvenate the environmental movement.

For one thing, as visible pollution has diminished, so has public concern over environmental issues. According to a recent Gallup survey, “Americans are now less worried about a series of environmental problems than at any time in the past 20 years.”

This decline in concern would be fine if visible pollution were all that mattered — but it isn’t, of course. In particular, greenhouse gases pose a greater threat than smog or burning rivers ever did. But it’s hard to get the public focused on a form of pollution that’s invisible, and whose effects unfold over decades rather than days. ...

Then came the gulf disaster. Suddenly, environmental destruction was photogenic again. ...

For the gulf blowout is a pointed reminder that the environment won’t take care of itself, that unless carefully watched and regulated, modern technology and industry can all too easily inflict horrific damage on the planet.

This oil spill has gotten a lot of coverage, and the risks of offshore drilling have become more obvious. However, since the bulk of the spill has remained offshore, most of the environmental damage is also offshore, underwater, and out of sight. This allows oil industry supporters to liken the spill to chocolate milk or assert that the damage is minimal. By contrast, the Santa Barbara spill that Krugman references coated California beaches in heavy oil where the damage was visible and obvious. Even if Krugman is right, this disaster seems a heavy price to pay for bringing environmental problems back into the public consciousness.