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July 19, 2010

Volunteers sought to monitor for oily birds

By Susan Deily-Swearingen CORRESPONDENT

NEWBURYPORT — The chances of oil from the Gulf reaching New England shorelines are slim, but a marine bird advocacy group is looking for help to be prepared for the worst.

Sarabeth Buckley, a Tufts University junior and intern with the Seabird Ecological Assessment Network (SEANET), will be at the Joppa Flats Audubon center Aug. 4 from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m. to enlist local volunteers to assist their efforts on local beaches.

SEANET is a group of interdisciplinary researchers and citizen scientists whose mission is to identify and mitigate threats to marine birds.

The beach monitoring program looks to gain knowledge of which local birds and beaches are being adversely affected and by what. Such information could then be used to target rescue efforts for pockets of birds in harm's way or to clean up areas whose birds demonstrate some kind of environmentally based harm.

NASA satellite images indicate that pockets of oil that has gushed into the Gulf of Mexico from an exploded oil well may have reached what's known as the loop current, causing these pockets to round the tip of Florida and making real the possibility that they could travel up the Eastern Seaboard toward New England's coastline.

Those currents may also carry the oil out into the Atlantic, noted Parker River Wildlife Refuge deputy manager Frank Drauszewski, who serves on the Area Contingency Committee run by the Coast Guard. He believes it's "highly unlikely" we will see the effects of any oil up this way.

But in case it does, the SEANET program, which is a joint venture of Tufts University's School for Veterinary Medicine and its Lloyd Center for the Environment, wants to monitor seabird mortality along the shoreline.

"We are hoping to work collaboratively with Mass. Audubon to boost the number of volunteers monitoring Massachusetts beaches," said Julie Ellis, director of SEANET. "If oil from the Gulf enters the Gulf Stream and heads our way, we'd like to have folks out there patrolling beaches so that they can alert us (and other authorities) to the presence of oil or oiled birds."

SEANET is looking for volunteers willing to walk and observe a 1 kilometer stretch of local beach at least once a month, all 12 months of the year. The monitors are asked to record beach conditions and photo-document any sea bird carcasses they might encounter. A volunteer may then submit their findings to a centralized database, the analysis of which is available to anyone looking for the data.

"(Volunteers) don't need any particular skills to do this," Buckley said. "They just need to be consistent with walks all year round. ... Many volunteers are seniors looking for a way to give back after retirement."

However, Buckley emphasized that volunteers should be year-round residents who will continue to walk the beaches even after cold weather sets in.

Volunteers are asked to fill out an online "Protocol and Volunteer Contract" committing to a particular section of coastline for one year. At this time they are also asked to report the conditions of the beach on the day they sign up as a way of establishing a baseline to which future reports can be compared.

Occasionally, a volunteer could be asked to collect a carcass as a sample.

"People submit photos, and they are cross-checked by a vet," Buckley said. "Abnormalities are sent to Tufts for necropsy."

It is important for veterinarians to get an accurate picture of what is causing these mortalities to be able to differentiate a death due to toxins such as oil from those due to things like plastic ingestion.

Sarah Courchesne, a veterinarian and project coordinator who has been with the project since 2007, is tasked with analyzing and verifying their data and answering any questions they may have. She said SEANET has more than 100 volunteers at this point, extending along the Eastern Seaboard as far south as Florida and Georgia.

"Volunteers in Georgia and Florida are on high alert, but haven't seen anything particular yet," she said.

The number of dead, dying and injured animals in the Gulf of Mexico is growing every day. As the BP disaster enters its third month, the numbers will likely only continue to escalate. According to a report by the National Fish and Wildlife Department dated July 11, in the states of Florida, Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi alone, more than 1,000 living and visibly oiled seabirds have been spotted thus far. The numbers of dead birds total more than 600 reported.

However, she added that oil-related deaths do make up between 2 to 3 percent of those the project sees even in a regular year. Last year the project had 400 birds to examine and approximately 100-120 of those died as a result of exposure to oil.

"The amount of oil the birds are exposed to is variable — sometimes it's only a spot and other times they are totally oiled," Courchesne said. "It is difficult to identify the source of the oil exactly because there is nothing to compare it to."

In cases like the BP leak in the Gulf oil can actually be "fingerprinted" or cross-matched between oil on a bird and a particular leak to identify its source. In the case of the birds SEANET sees in a regular year, such a comparison is usually impossible.

"It is speculated that the oil is partly from offshore and from some ships that may be doing some illegal dumping of bilge, including oil," Courchesne said.

SEANET studies birds that die from other man-made trauma as well.

"Gulls often die from trauma such as collisions with cars or boats, and the greater shearwater is often found to have starved to death," Courchesne said.

In many cases, this starvation is caused by a plastic ingestion that blocks the bird from properly swallowing their food. However, plastic can cause other problems as well.

"We won't say it is the plastic that is killing them directly, but in some cases it may be its slow toxicity," she said.

More information on the project can be found at Seanetters.wordpress.com.

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Volunteers sought to monitor for oily birds
by By Susan Deily-Swearingen , CORRESPONDENT , Mon Jul 19, 2010, 03:57 AM EDT

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