Rather than the government publishing the rescued bird data willingly, the Pensacola News Journal was forced to file Freedom of Information Act requests to pry it out of the Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) office's sneaky, grasping hands. No Oil At All (NOAA) controls the NRDA so it seems that they remain up to their same tired old tricks of minimizing the impact of BP's black monster.
One would think the huge difference in survival rates between Louisiana and Florida would prompt an agency who actually gives a rat's patootie about wildlife to do a careful investigation of why that happened to improve future rescue efforts. However, there is no mention in the story of NOAA bothering with any such thing.
Sadly, there were many birds rescued who are not normally seen close to shore which probably means that birds in the open ocean were seriously impacted.
More than 8,000 birds were collected during the oil spill, including 1,200 birds on Florida shores and waterways, according to a newly released database.
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The database, which the News Journal obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, contains details on each bird collected dead or alive by oil response crews from April 30, 10 days after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, to Nov. 6, about three months after the flow of oil was stopped.
The information was assembled from field reports filed by response crews and wildlife officials. It was compiled by a data management team at the Natural Resource Damage Assessment office in Fairhope, Ala.
Combined with aggregate data previously released by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the data offers the clearest picture to date of which areas and species were hit hardest by the spill.
From the data:
» Most of the birds collected were not species of concern. Only only one was endangered — a piping plover found in Louisiana.
» Fewer than a quarter of oiled birds captured in Florida survived. Of the 254 live birds with visible oil in Florida, only 42 were later released.
» Behind the northern gannet, the laughing gull was the second most collected, with 112 found dead or dying. After that came the common loon, pied-billed grebe, shearwater, brown pelicans and terns.
Kenneth Rosenberg, director of conservation science for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, said the large numbers of seabirds usually not sighted from the shore, such as northern gannets and shearwaters, are the most striking elements of the data.
"What the gannets are really telling us is there was a large impact in the open water," Rosenberg said. "There were probably a lot more seabirds affected."
Forty greater shearwaters were found dead Gulf-wide during the spill.
"Forty of a bird is nothing population-wise, but that's probably a greater number of shearwaters than have been seen in the Gulf by birdwatchers in years," Rosenberg said. "That means there was a large impact out in the Gulf that we mostly can't measure."
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Only 17 percent of the live oiled birds treated in Pensacola were later released — the lowest percentage of any Gulf Coast state.
In Louisiana, 72 percent of the 1,551 live oiled birds captured were later released.
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Driscoll [director of wildlife conservation at the Louisiana Coastal Initiative] said the data represent only a small portion of the total birds affected by the oil spill.
"Some of the high numbers are really significant, but these lists tell a tiny bit of the story," Driscoll said. "How many birds died out in open water that weren't represented? How many birds were oiled and their eggs or chicks didn't survive?"