The Nature of the Beast (according to Susan McCarthy)

Killdeer escape?

 

I had been trusted with the task of feeding the killdeer  chicks at the wildlife center. I put trays of food in the shorebird pen. Elaborate trays of shorebird dainties: freshly-thawed tiny invertebrates, insects, duckweed. I was careful to make sure no killdeer got out. It didn't seem hard, since the appalling sight of a human made them run, crouch, and freeze.  

 

But as I was walking back toward the main building, I heard a killdeer overhead. Nowhere near the shorebird pen. Now I was the one who froze.

 

Did I let one out? Oh no, did I forget to latch the door? Did they all get out? Oh no no no.

 

...sounds more like an adult killdeer – it's loud. And close.

 

Oh. 

 

*#^&+$%.

 

A mockingbird was atop a high pole, running through his imitations. Starting with some killdeer calls.

Giving me a pang of guilty fear. As if I need any more of those.

 

If he'd noticed, I'm sure he would have thought it was funny. He would do it again. Which is why it's important to stay stone-faced around mockers. Which you probably know. Because you went to grade school too.

Stowaway bird

Red-tailed tropicbirds are aces of tropical Pacific skies. They're big white birds with striking black eye markings. Each has two ridiculously long red tail feathers in the midst of its normal white tail feathers (thus Phaethon rubricauda). They catch fish by plunging into the sea from a height and grabbing them. Also squid.

The tropicbird is one of those seabirds that usually doesn't bother with land. They fly or rest on the water. But that doesn't work when a bird is in that awkward egg stage, so they breed on islands. They like to nest colonially, let's say on a nice coral atoll, tucked under a bush, or in a niche between hunks of coral.

Sometimes, apparently, a bird looking for a nice flat atoll lands on the nice flat deck of a ship, and tucks itself into a niche between cargo containers, and sits there peaceably waiting for the rest of the gang to show up, unfussed that the island it has selected is moving, like Spidermonkey Island in The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle.

Recently a tropicbird was found sitting zazen on a Korean cargo ship. When the ship arrived in southern California, the bird was brought to International Bird Rescue's San Pedro center, where she was found to be in good health. On a recent visit, I saw her there, resting on a mesh haul-out in a small private pool. She looked at us cheerfully. It seems that tropicbirds are among the island birds that have no fear of land animals such as humans.

Her pool was too small for plunge-feeding. IBR's blog has video of the tropicbird being fed fish. “Ah, they are grabbing my head. Yes, they are prying open my bill and inserting a fish. Ooh, there's a fish in my bill. Sweet.” The tropicbird swallows, sometimes with a little throat massage to urge the fish along, and sits placidly. It does not occur to her to reach a few inches forward and take another fish. That's not how she rolls.

Tropicbirds are aerialists but not distance fliers, so after tests came up negative for contagious diseases, and USFWS permission was received, the bird was put on a plane to Hawaii and then on another to Midway Island. There they put her in the water and off she flew.

Red-tailed tropicbirds breed on Midway, so with any luck she'll find a mate, and a nest site that doesn't shift coordinates, and will not depend on the kindness of Korean sailors, bird rescuers, and government agencies. Island tameness can be a disastrous feature for wild animals, but in this bird's case it worked out nicely.

Raven trading post

Bald Eagles are the specialty of the Alaska Raptor Center, in Sitka. It's an animal hospital in a forest. They treat 100-200 eagles a year, as well as other species. Many are treated and set free. Others have problems that mean they can't make it as wild birds any more. These generally go to zoos or become Ed Birds – used in educational programs of various kinds.

 

Some of the Ed Birds are in outdoor aviaries. When I visited this summer, one of the Ed Eagles, Volta, on a perch outdoors, became agitated when we passed by. My guide speculated that Volta remembered me unkindly from a previous visit.  (Although I am a friend to all animals, on that visit I was taking a course in eagle rehab, which involves doing a number of things that might displease a bird – captures, pedicures, beakicures, etc.) But it turned out that Volta was agitated about a wild eagle flying around the aviaries.

 

We moved on to view Gilly, an Ed Raven. Gilly came to the center in 1997, as Gilbert, a youth of three months with an elbow so shattered by a gunshot as to rule out wild life. Gilbert became an Ed Bird and at some point, I suppose, was revealed to be female. Gilly was in an outdoor aviary and gave us a haughty uninterested glance. She has a more complex life than one might guess an Ed Raven would have. She was once housed with two other ravens, but they are a couple, who demonstrated loyalty to each other by harassing Gilly, so she was given her own space.

 

Gilly has a wild friend, Romeo. He visits her frequently, so the Raptor Center thoughtfully put an extra-long perch in her aviary, which projects out through the wiring. Romeo can perch on the outside, and Gilly can perch on the inside, and they can sidle up to each other.

 

I do not know if Romeo and Gilly are romantically interested in each other. Ravens are fond of shiny things, and Romeo brings Gilly shiny things, and passes them to her through the wire. Gilly accepts them and passes Romeo bits of her food. She's no fool – she doesn't give him her salmon or her meat. She gives him vegetables and popcorn. Maybe she's concerned about his weight.

 

They won't do this if you're standing right there. But if you're a few aviaries away, you can look through several wire walls and see Romeo arrive and the subsequent exchanges. I long for the Raptor Center to set up a RavenSwapCam.  

 

It may be love, it may be commerce, or it may be a happy mix of the two. In any case it shows the complexity of ravens.

 

 

We love our stinky kids

The story about the smelly babies isn't true. Birds don't reject their nestlings if people have handled them and gotten human scent all over them. Most birds can't smell much, anyway. (But don't say this around a vulture. Or a kiwi. Or a fulmar.)

 I don't know how this story got started, but I certainly heard it  when I was a kid. Somehow it had an appalling plausibility –  our very touch turns innocent babies to pariahs.

(Not the actual baby robins I'm talking about.)

Fortunately for three small birds I met recently, it's nonsense. These robin nestlings fell out of their nest on a windy morning. They hit the sidewalk uninjured, and a kind passer-by picked them up (intelligently noting the address) and took them to the nearest animal shelter. The shelter had the expertise, and the feeding formula, to take care of the young birds. But they knew the best upbringing for robins comes from robins. They had eight million things to do besides feeding screaming baby robins every 20 minutes. A wildlife rescue organization would try to get the robins back to their parents.

 I'd been told that the best thing to do for uninjured baby birds is to get them back up in their nest, or near their nest, or at least up in the branches of their tree out of cat-reach, and let their parents take care of them. I believed it. But I had never done it. (What if it were as false as the human-stink story?)

We inspected the site. With the address, we could identify the home tree, but it was leafy and no nest could be seen. Besides, that nest was clearly a slipshod dealio that baby robins fell out of in a high wind, a flimsy sieve, a deathtrap. We'd have to rig up a substitute. The worrying part was that there didn't seem to be any robins there. The parents were supposed to be hanging around calling for their children. But no. No one was around but blackbirds. By this time the babies had been away most of the day. Had the parents given up? 

 We thought we'd try anyway, so we went to get the chicks. They were past the naked blob stage, into the partially-feathered lump stage. They were starting to have robin faces. Maybe a week from fledging, they were correctly-behaved bird children. They alternated between gaping and screeching, twittering softly, and squatting silent and motionless like little lumps of ugly. The shelter gave them a feeding, which would last them in case their parents never returned and we had to bring them back.

Back at the tree, we scanned for robins. Nothing. Using a ladder, we wired a plastic tub into the branches, making sure it wouldn't tip in the wind like certain shoddy constructions. We'd made drainage holes so liquid couldn't collect in it. That was the nest. The shelter staff had made a nice lining with pine needles and bits of a feather duster. While the wiring took place, the nestlings hunkered low inside, pretending not to exist.  

 We took the ladder away and looked around. No robins. We peered around with binoculars. Nothing but blackbirds. We crossed the street and sat on a bench and looked. No robins. So we got in the car and drove away, but then came back, and parked across the street, taking advantage of robins' inability to read license plates or tell a Delorean from a Hupmobile. We stayed in the car. Blackbirds flew over the tree, perched on a wire above the tree, and squeaked at other blackbirds, but there were no robins.  

 Until suddenly there was a silent robin in the tree next to the nest tree. With something in its bill. It silently dived into the nest tree. It had been 16 minutes since we walked away from the tree.

To be sure it was true, we walked down the other side of the street, crossed, and casually walked under the tree, glancing up for just a second as we did. An adult robin was perched – silently – two feet from the nest tub.

 It makes sense that parent birds would approach the nest without making giveaway sounds, but I'm still amazed that they so quickly detected that their kids were back (in a nearby location, with a new pre-fab house) and resumed food deliveries.

 Mostly, I'm delighted that they overlooked the fact that the kids must have reeked of rescuer stink.

 

Follow-up:

I went by the nest tree about two weeks after we put it up. Since the young robins had been about a week from fledging, I wasn't worried about disturbing things. Everything was the same. The nest was still up there, if you looked, and no robins were in sight. I was relieved that the plastic nest hadn't been distubed.

Going back later to remove the nest, I saw that the tree had been heavily pruned since the last visit. It was no longer a thickly-leaved place where you could hide a nest. Whoever had pruned the tree had carefully left the plastic nest. It was a touching gesture, although the nest was now too exposed to be safe. I was very glad that the pruning had happened after the babies had fledged. I took the nest down and examined the lining. It appeared well used.

Babies are often brought into rescue centers when trees being pruned or felled turn out to have nests -- baby birds, squirrel pups, dragonets.* It's better to prune out of nesting season.

Early this morning, I went back to look for young robins, and saw this squirt in the little park across the street. The spots on the feathers show that this bird fledged this year and hasn't gone through the preformative molt yet -- that it's just a child.

It could be some other robins' child, but it's the right age and the right place to be one of the three rescued fledglings.

 

(*Okay, probably not dragonets.)

 

Mystery pigeon

I was reading Indian Summer, by Thomas Jefferson Mayfield, an account of the years Mayfield was raised among the Choinumne Indians of California.

 It's an interesting account, which includes a description of an ingenious traditional method of pigeon hunting. This involved building a blind from which one could snare pigeons with thin nooses. It had to be built in the right place, where pigeons would come to drink at dawn. “They liked to water at a spring or water hole near tall trees, especially pines. They... all tried to water at the same hole,” Mayfield wrote. “They would light in such numbers that sometimes they would strip the limbs from the trees. It would take these large flights from one to three hours to water. When they left a water hole, it was as badly drained and trampled as though a thousand sheep had watered there.”

That sounded oddly familiar. Huge destructive flocks of pigeons breaking branches off trees with the weight of their numbers? I'd heard that before – but it was always about passenger pigeons (Ectopistes migratorius).

“When they alighted on the trees their weight was so heavy that not only big limbs and branches of the size of a man's thigh were broken straight off, but less firmly rooted trees broke down completely under the load,” wrote Pehr Kalm, in 1759, of the “marvelous multitudes” of passenger pigeons.

I had learned this in a 1911 issue of The Auk, the journal of the American Ornithologist's Union. (Which I was reading at the exceedingly cool Prelinger library, where they have amazing old journals as well as books.) This sad issue was dedicated to the passenger pigeon, describing a bird that seemed to be extinct in the wild (and would soon be extinct in captivity) – but holding out the hope that there might be a few left.

The AOU had offered rewards for passenger pigeon nests – and been deluged with mourning dove nests. “It now looks as if the worst fears of the American naturalists... [are] confirmed, and that we are 'in at the death' of the finest race of pigeons the world has produced,” wrote C. F. Hodge.

Wallace Craig described the calls of passenger pigeons as he remembered them, in hopes that this might help people find survivors. “[I]f you tell a boy to look for a bird of the same general appearance as the Mourning Dove but larger, he will be sure to mistake some large-appearing Mourning Dove for the Passenger Pigeon. But tell him to look for a pigeon that shrieks and chatters and clucks instead of cooing, and the boy will be less likely to make a mistake.” Among other calls, Craig describes the keck, the
kah-of-excitement, and the keeho. He provides musical notation for pigeons he observed in an aviary, including  the notes given by the male “when just about to tickle female's head.” The last passenger pigeon died in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo. Martha, she was called.

Wait, so what did Mayfield see? Passenger pigeons ranged North American forests east of the Rockies. They were never in California. Mayfield just called the birds the Choinumne hunted “pigeons.” I think these were band-tailed pigeons (Patagioenas fasciata), birds which are hunted in California to this day. They live in forests west of the Rockies. 

Mourning doves also occur in California – and across the continent – and are also hunted. But they prefer open and semi-open country. I've never heard of their flocks breaking branches.

I wondered if band-tailed pigeons were a west-of-the-Rockies version of that east-of-the-rockies bird, the passenger pigeon. Putting the names of both pigeons into a search engine, I saw that a brand-new study of pigeon and dove DNA had been published in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution. Contrary to the previous belief that the passenger pigeon's closest relative is the mourning dove (pointy-tailed, both of them), the study found that the band-tailed pigeon is the closest relative.

Kevin Johnson, one of the authors of the study, makes the point that a band-tail is not super-closely related to a passenger pigeon. "This bird is pretty diverged from its nearest relatives, meaning it had a unique place in the world. It represented a unique lineage that's now gone," he told Science Daily.

Well, obviously. A band-tail doesn't even have a pointy tail. Nevertheless, this is the closest thing we have left to a passenger pigeon and I plan to cherish the species on that basis.

It seems I am not the only one who find band-tails a workable substitute for passenger pigeons. Passenger pigeons were afflicted with a species of bird louse. Because the species was described only in 1937 (by  Malcomson – I shall call it Malcomson's bird louse) and because it was believed these lice had lost their last home when Martha died in 1914, they were called Columbicola extinctus. But guess who else suffers from Malcomson's very same bird louse? Yes! Band-tails do.

It so happens that I had a band-tailed pigeon once, long ago. I found him on a lawn under some trees, too young to fly. I had no idea what to do to help him except take him home and feed him and name him Bertrand Russell.

(I now know that the best thing I could have done was to put him back up in the trees, even if I had to tie a shoebox to a branch for him to squat in, and then leave him alone. That way he would be out of the reach of ground predators, like dogs and cats. His parents would have come and fed him and said encouraging things to him as soon as I left. I wish I had known to do that. I still feel okay about naming him.)

I took good care of Bertrand Russell. He was old enough to know that he was a pigeon and I was not. Though he accepted food from my hand, he didn't like being around humans and that included me. He resented the whole deal. He perched on a high shelf on top of Walker's Mammals of the World (the binding still shows the traces) and thought bitter thoughts.

 

I raised Bertrand Russell until he was feathered out and could fly. I released him in good band-tailed pigeon habitat, a forested area where birders regularly saw band-tails, but it was an abrupt transition for him, what they call a “hard release.” I still feel bad that it was the best I could do.

In 1834, the traveller Thomas L. McKenney was crossing Lake Superior in a storm when a desperate storm-tossed passenger pigeon landed on his boat. He prevented the boatmen from killing it, fed it water and crackers, put it in a mocock (a birchbark basket), and took it home. “[T]hough only a pigeon, it came to me in distress, and if it be its pleasure, we will never part.” He named it Me-me. “It knows its name, and will come when called.” Boy, that doesn't sound like Bertrand.

I never saw bird lice on Bertrand Russell, missing a chance to meet a species back from extinction. But I saw Bertrand himself, a grim bird intent on survival, even if he had to put up with the attentions of a teenaged human. It's the closest I'll ever get to a passenger pigeon, and in retrospect, I'm thrilled about it.

Tiny tar pits for the home

Glue traps are nasty. Animals caught in them die slow horrible deaths. Some people don't mind that for the mice and rats they intend to trap, but are upset when some other creature falls victim.

 At a wildlife rescue center, someone recently brought in a glue trap with a mockingbird hopelessly plastered to it. The bird had been bounding along on mockingbird business when it hopped onto the trap and got its feet stuck. It struggled to get free, striking down with its wings, getting its wings trapped, hitting the trap with its bill, getting its bill stuck, and so forth until it couldn't move at all. It was immobile, terrified.

The person who set the trap found it while the bird was still alive, and rushed it to the rescue centre, swearing they'd never put a glue trap out again.

 What you do in such a case may or may not start with cutting away with the base of the trap. You may sprinkle open areas of glue with sand or some kind of powder, so if you free part of the bird it won't instantly get stuck again, and so your hand or glove won't get stuck. Then you apply an oil like canola oil, to dilute and loosen the intensely sticky “glue.” (Some people use powder for this step too.)

 Now the bird isn't gluey, but it's seriously oily. Still terrified but maybe also starting to feel peeved. It wants to leave.

 Then you have to wash the oil off the angry bird. (Warm water with 1-2% dishwashing liquid.)

 Then you have to rinse the soapy water off the furious bird.

 Then you have to dry the enraged bird, probably with a heat lamp.

 The process is so traumatic that you don't do it all at once, since the bird probably wouldn't survive the shock and horror. It may also have torn feathers out when struggling in the glue.

After the mockingbird had been through all this, was unglued, clean and dry, it had a day or two in a warm dim quiet place (with food and water) so its condition could stabilize, and was transferred to another wildlife rescue center with better facilities for small perching birds.  

When the bird had recovered from its ordeal and had preened its plumage back into passable condition, it was set free.

 

I looked on YouTube for videos showing animals being freed from glue traps and cleaned. There weren't many, and the best one was too long to put here. (It's an eastern phoebe. Rather than saying the classic “phoe-be!” or even giving an alarm call, it's clacking its bill in a threatening way. 'I'm clean enough! Stand back! Okay, now I'm mad! Watch out!')

 The video search was depressing. It showed that many people think animals getting caught in glue traps is hilarious, and some people think that other people getting stuck in glue traps is incredibly sexy.

 On the other hand, I did find these excellent video clips suggesting that being stuck in glue is funny when it happens to a perpetually unsuccessful yet irrepressible coyote. Who was the one who put the glue there in the first place. (Think about that, setters of glue traps.)

 

 

 

Lucky swan, secret sorrow

Earlier this year, a wildlife rescue center took in a mute swan (Cygnus olor).

Mute swans aren't native birds. In North American we have tundra swans, whooper swans, and trumpeter swans. Some people buy mute swans, the lovely birds of classic European imagery, and place them on ornamental water to make it even more ornamental. Sometimes the swans go wild, move to wilder waters, raise families there. Because they're not native, they don't have the same legal protections, and because they're not native, some people disapprove of them. (It's said that they're hard on aquatic vegetation and ecosystems.)

But this swan wasn't feral. He dwelled on ornamental water where he had been placed, only now he was very sick and looked like he might stop dwelling at any moment. He was too weak to stand, a pancaked fowl.

Since he was a private bird, he might have gone to a private veterinarian, but vets who see swans are rare, and the wildlife center has waterfowl experience. The swan was lucky.
 
Once I found a sick bird on a beach. We were in an unfamiliar town, but I eventually got a number for a wildlife rescue center. “I found a bird...” I began, but a bored voice interrupted. “We only take native species,” it said. “You
probably have a starling. We don't take them.”

“Actually I think it's a marbled godwit.”

“Oh!” the nativist cried in sudden interest. “Bring it right in!”

But most wildlife centers take some non-native species. They may not be delighted, but they won't turn you and your bedraggled find away from their door.

The swan had been admitted, and treated, and was feeling a lot better. He could stand now. His benefactors had gone on the buddy system – they didn't go alone into his pen.

Swans are big. And grumpy. Not only do they hiss and bite, but with their wings they can hit very hard, so hard that it is said they can break human bones. People are charmed by the fact that swans are devoted spouses and parents, but one way swans express that is by beating up anyone who comes too close to their family.

Three of the most common reactions to seeing a swan can be summarized as:

    “Oh look, how beautiful!”
    “Those things can break your arm.”
    “What is that, a pelican?”

I like to summarize three swan reactions as:

    “Yes, you may admire my beauty from a great distance.”
    “Not as long as you stay a great distance away.” 
    “A pelican? I'm gonna come over there and break your arm.”



No one wanted to mix it up with rescue swan now that he had his strength back. Perhaps he was ready to be returned to his ornamental water. But there was a problem. He had lost weight and he wasn't gaining it back. Despite his recovery, he wasn't eating well.

They discussed his case at morning rounds. What was going on with him? Someone asked if he had a mate. Yes, a mate and cygnets too. Ah. He was lonesome for his family. Treatment plan: reunion.

(This shows a good understanding of different species. You wouldn't ask this question about a male peacock or a male hummingbird, because they aren't family men.)

The swan missed his family. To me it also seems possible that he worried about them. I doubt a swan envisions particular scenarios – monstrous humans kidnapping his wife, falcons grabbing his children – but possibly this swan envisioned his family alone, without him on guard, and he wanted to be back defending them. Taking names and breaking arms.

 


 

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.

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.