The Nature of the Beast (according to Susan McCarthy)

Turtles in the soup, part 1: Mystic dawn rites

It seemed like a grave ceremony at a turtle temple. A silent line of identically-dressed people lifted turtles from tanks one at a time. Each turtle was carried in the same ritual position and taken through the same stations. A wand was waved over each turtle. Quiet words were murmured. Inscriptions were made. Tags were produced. Each turtle in turn was transferred to another serious person in identical garb, who examined it mutely and seriously, inspected the inscriptions, placed the turtle in a special container, and affixed the tag. Observers stood in silence.

I was in the Florida Panhandle, reporting on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion and spill. This was a turtle-washing facility set up in a locked area at the back of Gulf World in Panama City Beach. Media hellhounds like me were being let in, on our best behavior, to behold an early-morning transfer of young turtles from the oiled-turtle-washing-and-stabilization center at Gulf World to a turtle-rehab center at SeaWorld Orlando, on the other side of Florida. (The turtles aren't on display to the public in either place.)

There were reasons for the eerie details. The identically-clad people were Gulf World and Sea World employees in uniform (royal blue shirts, black or khaki shorts, rubber boots). They walked in lines because there was a narrow zone between the “dirty”/oily side of the facility and the clean side. The silence was to avoid getting the turtles  used to human voices. No one wanted them to grow up into “pier rats.” The turtles were carried in the approved way for turtles this size, faced away from the human, held behind the front flippers. Some turtles sculled with their flippers as they were carried. The wand checked a microchip implanted in each turtle.

The grave atmosphere came from respect for the rare animals – endangered Kemp's ridleys (Lepidochelys kempii). It came from determination to help mitigate the oil's damage (and awareness that many more turtles had died). It came from the knowledge that everything was being recorded. (A few times I overheard an acolyte whisper the name of a departing turtle: Mikey! Buzz! It's Lance!)

Media attention was the least of it. Scientific data that might be gained was also subsidiary. (There weren't nearly enough turtles to make a study.) It was explained that the turtles were evidence. The microchips, records, re-checking of records before packing each turtle in a labeled container – all maintained the chain of custody.

CSI: Gulf of Mexico.

Beak outlook

In Fort Jackson, Louisiana, the little bird having the oil washed off was struggling passionately. I couldn't figure out what it was. Not a gull, not a tern – could it be a rail? No, surely not. I was told it was a black skimmer.

 
But I've seen skimmers (Rynchops niger). They don't look like that. I was told it was a young one. Skimmers don't hatch with those bizarre long bills with the lower mandible longer than the upper. (How would that fit in an egg?)

Then I remembered other bird species in which little snub bills of the chicks give hardly any clue to the crazy big bills they'll have as adults.

Chicks' bills have to fit in the egg, and they have to be used to get out of the egg. After they hatch, there's time for bills to elongate or bulk up, to curve down or up, or to acquire interesting attachments if necessary.

The clean little skimmer was moved to the rinse table, where it continued to resist. You rinse my wing, I'll stamp on your hand! Stop or I'll I bite you! There, I bit you! I might do it again! Finally they wrapped the defiant creature in a towel and hustled it off to the drying room. (Many birds never seem to think of stabbing people in the eye with their bills. Instead they bite. You don't want to be bitten by an eagle or a swan, but when an egret bites you, it's okay. They don't have the leverage.)

I went looking for video of birds in which the chicks have to go through some serious bill growth to catch up to their parents. I found these spoonbills (Platalea ajaja) at Animal Kingdom in Orlando.

Also this shoebill (Balaeniceps rex) family at the Lowry Park Zoo in Tampa. The chick doesn't have the big bill yet, but it has the slow serious demeanor you need to carry off a giant smiley proboscis.

There's an unsettling video from a camera inside a trumpeter hornbill (Bycanistes bucinator) nest. Trumpeter hornbills, like some other hornbills, have a system in which the married female seals herself into a nest cavity with an adobe of her own devising (mud, fruit pulp, and bird dung, if you want the recipe). She leaves just a small opening through which food can be passed.

Once immured, she lays eggs. In fact, as long as she's in there, and not flying around, she molts her feathers. Her devoted spouse may help her build the wall. The advantage is thought to be that this keeps their eggs, and then chicks, safe from predators, and perhaps from other hornbills.

Time passes, the eggs hatch into revolting little hornbills, and the male feeds them all. When it gets simply too crowded in the nest cavity, the mother breaks herself out.

In this video of captive breeding, the hornbill cam shows not-dressed-for-company mother and repulsive not-dressed-at-all child in the nest. At the far end is the opening, and there is much excitement and whining as the devoted father starts passing snacks in to his wife, who feeds them to their horrifying child. Who looks even more disgusting with banana oozing out of the corner of its bill – but notice what a normal-looking bill it is.

Some birds go with a cuter look.
Even if you think they're adorable, though, it's more polite not to stare and talk about whether chicks have their parent's nose. You might embarrass them. They might get all shy.

Oh, here's what a grown-up skimmer's bill is good for. For this to work out, the water should be clean.

Happy clams

Everyone knew this but me, I guess. On the right beaches, clams will tickle you.

I was recently in Gulf Shores, Alabama, wondering how the oil spill clean-up was getting along. It was getting along great. At least on this beach.

I'd never visited Alabama beaches. The sand was luminously pale, almost as white as the sugar it is compared to. And clean. The water was clear except for swirling sand. Along the beach birds lined up, studying the water. When a wave receded, a gull or a willet would often sprint forward and snatch something.
 
I waded in to the mild water. When waves receded, small shells became visible. Nice.


What's this? Shells were tipping on end and sinking into the sand. Tiny living clams were reburying themselves. I'd never seen such active, speedy shellfish.

Just below the surface, the sand was thick with little clams, less than an inch long. When a wave uncovered them they quickly dug back down.

Hey, cool. It turns out that you can dig your foot into the soft sand and edge it over so it's beneath the clams. When the next wave ebbs, drawing away sand covering the clams, they burrow down and tickle your feet. (“What's this? Weird rock? Feels soft – can I dig through it? How about here?”)

I thought I saw a bigger clam. I tapped it to see if it was empty. It was a crab, quick to pinch.

Nearby was a large temporary yard full of equipment that had been used to clean the beach, earth-moving machines, bins, portable toilets. (It's easier to clean a beach than a marsh.)


In a nearby oysterhouse* I remarked to a waiter, whom I'll call Luke, on how great the beaches looked. He said the oil had mostly come ashore in the form of tar balls. Unfortunately people had gotten the idea that the whole area was drenched in sheets of oil – and tourism had plummeted. I thought the place looked busy, but he said it was perhaps 40% of normal for the season. “It's the press,” he said. “They keep showing those same pictures over and over.”

                                            (*Oyster stew, followed by fried oyster salad. Marvelous.)

True. Who wants to see a picture of normality when they can see a picture of news? If there's an oil spill, you want to see a picture of oil. If a man bites a dog, you'd like to see a picture of that, not a picture of a man and dog on good terms. Those who supply pictures and narratives want to provide the ones that people are interested in. (It's also easier to photograph a beach than a marsh.)

If there's an earthquake, you want to see a picture of earthquake damage. After the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, a dramatic photograph of a collapsed house in San Francisco's Marina district was shown around the world. It wasn't false. That house did collapse, a piece of the Bay Bridge did give way, an Oakland freeway overpass fell and crushed people to death in their cars. It was also true that most houses, most roads, most bridges were unharmed.

I told Luke that most San Franciscans got desperate calls from far-away friends and family who were afraid we were trapped in collapsed houses. “We saw the pictures! Are you okay?”

In good newsgathering, dramatic pictures come with perspective. We need to be told what percentage of houses are damaged and whether in fact there was more damage in less-famous cities seventy miles away – or what percentage of beaches have oil. (People also need to pay attention to that information.)

It's more difficult with breaking news – when the facts aren't all in yet, when the facts are changing. When no one knows yet how many houses have structural damage (and they're unwilling to commit themselves “for insurance reasons”). When a beach that's clean might have tar again in the morning.

Luke asked what I did for a living. Bravely, I told him I was with the press. He didn't fling anything. He beamed. “I'm jealous of you!” he said.

Earlier, I stood calf-deep in the lovely Gulf waters, and called a friend. She was in California, but she grew up in Alabama, and spent childhood vacations with her family at Gulf Shores. Earlier television broadcasts had about broken her heart. It gladdened her to hear that the sand was clean. The water was clear. The clams were zippy.

Why pelicans refuse manicures

Oil spill oil takes different forms. It can manifest as an iridescent sheen, a viscous stinking black layer, tarballs, an orangeish mousse.

Oil spill regulars can weigh the effects of different oils on smirched animals. Bunker C Crude versus diesel? Diesel is worse. 

Spilled oil changes. Last week I visited the Deepwater Horizon wildlife rescue center in Fort Jackson, Louisiana (since moved to Hammond, Louisiana, to be out of the hurricane evacuation zone). Among the birds were many young birds. Not nestling babies, not reckless teenagers out on their own, more like bird children. Old enough to walk around, go down to the shores of nesting islands, play in the water, and get oiled by the sheen on that water.

Good news was that rescuers aren't seeing oil burns on these birds. Oil often contains volatile chemicals like toluene and xylene (the ones you smell when you walk past the nail salon), benzenes, sulphates, things that can burn skin, eyes, and lungs.

Jay Holcomb, the director of IBRRC (the International Bird Rescue Research Center, which along with Tri-State Bird Rescue is running four oiled-wildlife centers in the Gulf states), compared this to a previous spill in Louisiana. That also happened in nesting season. “We had 1,000 baby pelicans. Only 250 lived – they did really well. The rest died because they were sunburned from the oil,” he says. “We learned a lot about how to raise baby pelicans.”

The Deepwater Horizon oil had a long way to drift before it hit the nesting islands. Apparently a lot of volatile compounds evaporated on the way. So, no burns.

“It's a different kind of oil. It's actually easier to get off than the Cosco Busan,” an IBRRC worker tells me. (In that San Francisco Bay spill, the container  ship Cosco Busan hit a pier of the Golden Gate Bridge, spilling 50-55,000 gallons of bunker fuel oil.)
 
Any kind of oil that gets on birds' plumage can kill them. We used to hear that birds were kept waterproof by natural oils in their feathers, but that's not exactly right. It's the feathers themselves. Feather by feather, vane by vane, and barb by barb, plumage slides in place to make a perfectly waterproof shell over a bird's skin. Down feathers next to the skin hold warmth. Natural oils from a bird's preen gland condition the feathers. But feather structure, correctly aligned by preening, is what waterproofs an aquatic bird.
 

Other kinds of oil disrupt feather alignment. Feathers clump and pull away from each other. Water can get in next to the bird's skin. Birds, who run at a higher body temperature than people, get chilled fast.

A single non-waterproof spot in a bird's plumage where water leaks in will gradually soak the whole bird. One spot of oil can do this. If you have the bird in a pool, you will see it ride lower and lower as the water soaks in and makes it heavier. A wild bird may head for land when it finds itself sinking.

Bird rescue facilities like to have warm-water pools so they can test the birds' waterproofing without getting them chilled. That's one advantage to an oil spill in the South in the summer. I visited the bird rescue center in Theodore, Alabama. “The nice thing about this heat, this oppressive heat, is that the animals don't get cold,” said Californian Michelle Bellizzi. “The birds are way more used to this than I am.”

Petroleum oils aren't the only ones that can kill water birds. A few years ago there was an outbreak of desperate oiled birds stranding on the California coast. Forensic analysis of the oil was done to figure out its source. It turned out to be fish oil, dumped by some fishing boat, just as deadly to seabirds as anything pumped from under desert sands. You could kill birds with extra-virgin olive oil.

The name of a 1991 incident tells the story: the Wisconsin Fire and Butter Spill. (Hard to believe, but melted butter is not always a good thing.)

For that matter, if you don't completely rinse the detergent solution off the birds after you wash them, that disrupts their waterproofing too, and can kill them just as quickly as the oil it washed off.

But thorough washing and complete rinsing, followed by the bird's intensive preening, can do the trick.

Why bother?

Wildlife rescue professionals responding to the Deepwater Horizon spill have been working very hard for months now. Oddly, they're kind of touchy when you mention people who've recently been saying that it shouldn't be done at all. They're mostly polite, but they talk faster and start peer reviewing right on the spot.

The contrarians say oiled birds almost all die, even when they've been washed. They cite some studies with sad results. They say that washing them isn't in their best interest. That they will suffer painful deaths after they're released. That euthanasia is the humane course. That there are better ways to spend money to help birds than on doomed victims. That it's not worth it.

It's worth it to those saved.

Oiled birds don't know rescuers are trying to save them, so they don't cooperate, yet they share a goal with the rescuers. They're struggling to live.

Animals don't want to suffer, but they'd rather suffer than die.

Sometimes it's worth it to animal species and populations. Sometimes it's not. (But since when have people cared only about species and populations? We're obsessed with individuals.)

As for those studies? People who say that most washed birds die anyway are picking the grimmest studies they can find. If they picked other studies, they could find much happier results. In some studies, many birds survive.

Unfortunately, studies are hard to compare. The rate of survivorship depends on a lot of things. What kind of birds were oiled, what kind of oil it was, how quickly they were brought for washing, how cold they got beforehand. Different rescue groups have different standards for triage and for release, which makes their results hard to compare.

It would also be relevant to know what survivorship was of birds that were never oiled and washed. In some species, most birds – especially first-year birds – don't make it from one year to the next even when life is great.

Brown pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis) are one of the species being washed in large numbers in the Gulf, and they're tough types.

Another tough customer that's suffered from oil spills is the African penguin (Spheniscus demersus) also called the Black-footed penguin for its dark feet, or the jackass penguin for its poignant brays.

The 2000 sinking of the MV Treasure drenched their nesting islands in oil. 19,500 penguins were washed and released. They've survived well and gone on to breed almost as successfully as non-oiled birds. (There had been a previous big spill there in 1994, when the Apollo Sea went down in the same area.)

One great thing about penguins is that they can wear flipper bands you can read at a distance, and they stand around while you get the binoculars on them. So it's relatively easy to get penguin data.

While the birds are tough, the species was officially Vulnerable in 2000, and is now Endangered. This is probably because they can't get enough fish to eat, probably because commercial fisheries near the islands are catching so many.

Here's the thing: using that good penguin data, it's been calculated that this imperiled population is 19% bigger than it would have been if oiled penguins hadn't been washed and released.

Worth it.
 

Another story.

In 1996, after the Anitra oil spill in Delaware, some endangered piping plovers (Charadrius melodus) were among the oiled birds.


Rescuers from Tri-State Bird Rescue & Research trapped and washed the oily plovers. Because it was nesting season, they released them earlier than they ordinarily would. One of the birds was a female, whose mate hadn't been oiled. He sat tight on the eggs while she was missing.

When she reappeared, skinny, clean, and ready to take her *&^%$& turn, he jumped up and raced off for his first decent meal in two days. They settled back into their nesting routine, but some *&*^*$# came along and ate their eggs. She laid some more. Some #$%&^* came along and ate those. She laid some more. A late storm buried the nest in sand. The next morning the plovers dug up the eggs and resumed sitting on them. One egg hatched. Plover chick!

Worth it.