Veterinarian Rebecca Duerr gasps as she gently squeezes the belly of the black and white bird on her exam table. The size of a crow, with tomato-red eyes, a yellow beak, and a swan-like neck, the creature squawks feebly. Super skinny, Duerr announces as a colleague holds a towel over the bird’s head to keep it calm.
Eight days earlier, the bird, a western grebe, had been driven to the International Bird Rescue center in San Pedro from Santa Barbara, where it had become mired in oil that naturally seeps from cracks in the sea floor.
Seeing an oiled bird never gets easier, Duerr says. Their feathers, once evenly spaced and waterproof, stick together in matted clumps. With their sensitive skin exposed, they might start to shiver, or develop burns from the crude. Once effortlessly buoyant, they may struggle to stay afloat in water.
Conservation-minded Americans have been attempting to save oiled seabirds since at least the 1940s, but for several decades they did so without trainingor much success. Nearly 80 years and several catastrophic oil spills later, oiled seabirds have a better chance of survival thanks to rehabilitation techniques honed by groups like International Bird Rescue.
International Bird Rescue’s Southern California center treats up to 400 oil-covered birds each year, mostly victims of Santa Barbara’s natural seeps. This allows the center’s staff to determine what methods work best in preparation for larger spills. It’s a benefit and a disadvantage, says Julie Skoglund, the center’s operations manager. We see the same tough things over and over again, but that means we get to be on the leading edge of finding solutions.
Such work is urgent. Seabirds are the most vulnerable species-group of birds; of 328 known species in the world, 102 are threatened or endangered. Seabirds face danger from invasive predators, climate change, and the gill nets used by commercial fishermen, which claim about 400,000 avian lives a year. Oil spills can be especially devastating: between 100,000 and a million birds are estimated to have died in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster.
The oil that the unlucky western grebe encountered in Santa Barbara leaks into the ocean naturally. But it was an industrial disaster in the same waters 51 years ago that spurred the professionalization of seabird rehabilitation.
While tending to an offshore rig near Santa Barbara on January 28, 1969, Union Oil company workers were alarmed when a well they’d completed began gushing oil, gas, and mud. They plugged the well, but oil continued to gurgle into the ocean through cracks in the sea floor. By the time the leak was fully contained, it had become the worst oil spill in United States history. As many as 4.2 million gallons of crude oil had entered the ocean, spreading 80 miles north to Pismo Beach and 235 miles south to Mexico. The pollution killed at least 3,686 seabirds, whose pitiful images were splashed across newspapers around the country.
I am amazed at the publicity for the loss of a few birds, Union Oil president Fred Hartley said callously at the time.
There were no professionals dedicated to caring for oiled birds then. Instead, volunteers scooped up western grebes, cormorants, and other sticky birds, plopped them in cardboard boxes, and carried them to makeshift cleaning stations.
The destruction inspired a rash of environmental legislation and motivated Gaylord Nelson, then a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, to found Earth Day on April 22, 1970.
Indignation deepened less than a year later when two oil tankers collided in the San Francisco Bay, killing thousands of seabirds. Alice Berkner, a retired nurse with a passion for wildlife, founded International Bird Rescue shortly after. Many other organizations, including Tri-State Bird Rescue, another prominent avian rehabilitation group, followed. Today, the Oiled Wildlife Care Network at University of California, Davis, includes more than 40 member organizations in the state of California alone.
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