Kansas City Veterinary Medical Association

Wildlife Rescue to Take Years in Aftermath of Ongoing Oil Spill

by Jen Nigro

Image 1: Oiled Pelicans at the Ft. Jackson, Louisiana Rehabiliation Center. Photo by Sharon K. Taylor. Image 2: Dr. Sharon K. Taylor, Wildlife Veterinarian, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service holding an oiled Pelican that is being tube feed at the Ft. Jackson, Louisiana Rehabiliation Center. Photo by Wesley Verril, USFWS. Image 3: Dr. Sharon Taylor of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer 3rd Class Andrew Anderson observe a sea turtle aboard a U.S. Coast Guard HC-144A Ocean Sentry aircraft, May 30, 2010. The turtle was found stranded on Louisiana’s coast and transported to Florida for release. U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Luke Pinneo.

More than two months after a massive oil slick began spreading through the Gulf of Mexico, wildlife rescue efforts are ramping up. The Deepwater Horizon, an oil rig owned by BP, exploded on April 20, then sank April 22. According to a June 20 Wall Street Journal article, scientists estimated the leak was putting out between 35,000 and 60,000 barrels a day. While the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service concentrates on rescuing affected wildlife, Tri-State Bird Rescue and Research in Newark, Delaware is heading up the wildlife rehabilitation effort. Its experts first arrived on the scene April 26, and began working with BP, the U.S. Coast Guard and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to assess the situation. Over the last several weeks, rescuers have been patrolling the shoreline looking for oiled animals. They have a vast area to cover as they search for victims in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. As of June 20, recovery teams had collected 1,627 birds, 494 sea turtles, 50 mammals (including dolphins) and one other reptile. Louisiana’s bird and mammal populations have been the hardest hit so far, along with Mississippi’s sea turtle population. While many have died, experts are still working to identify the cause of death, and say some will have died of natural causes.

Dr. Sharon Taylor is a wildlife veterinarian and a Contaminants Division Chief with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She received her DVM from Kansas State University in 1991. While she is based in Carlsbad, California, she is one of many experts who have already been in the field helping with the wildlife recovery effort. She has already spent six weeks in Louisiana, where she was responsible for coordinating wildlife veterinarians across the spill area, and just returned for another 30 days. While there she also serves as a law enforcement liaison, works with the morgue and coordinates bird release efforts. Dr. Taylor says it’s already clear that the spill will have long-term and far-reaching effects on wildlife in the spill area. “This is unprecedented in both the quantity of oil across the Gulf and the use of dispersants to try to break it up, which has its own toxicological effects. So it’s ecologically devastating, it’s massive and it’s nowhere near an end yet.” While Dr. Taylor coordinates with veterinarians working on sea turtles, dolphins and other sea mammals, she herself primarily works with migratory birds. Each bird treated must go through a lengthy cleanup process. It starts when bird teams and shoreline teams net affected birds and transport them to a triage stabilization center. Once there, birds are given fluids and veterinarians stabilize their body temperature. “If they’ve been out on the ocean they may be hypothermic because feathers clump up and they lose their temperature regulation,” says Dr. Taylor. “If they’re on the beach down in Louisiana, they can get sunburned and get too hot.” Stabilization takes anywhere from a couple of hours to a day. From there, the birds go to the washing center. Once again, they must be stabilized before they can go through the 30 to 40-minute washing process using Dawn dish detergent. The birds start in a tub containing a 4% solution, eventually progressing to a 2% solution. Then it’s off to the drying room where their body temperatures are allowed to return to normal. Once dry, the birds are moved to outside preening pens. They spend the next four to ten days realigning their feathers and regaining natural waterproofing abilities. The washing facility can hold hundreds of birds at any given time.

Once clean, the birds must be released back into the wild. This is done using the U.S. Coast Guard’s newest plane, the HC-144A Ocean Sentry. This plane in particular allows recovery teams to transport larger numbers of wildlife with shorter transit times, minimizing additional stress on the birds. With oil still spilling from the well, this can get tricky. “You have to look at where is the species range, where is the oil trajectory, and try and pick the next best place that you potentially can,” says Dr. Taylor. Teams began by flying birds to the west coast of Florida. A change in the trajectory then pushed them to Florida’s east coast, and they are now taking cleaned birds to south Florida and south Texas. “We release them onto national wildlife refuges so they at least initially go out onto a protected area,” says Dr. Taylor. She says releasing the birds into protected areas also allows for continued monitoring so scientists can see how the oil spill affects future generations. “We’re not going to know the effects for years and years because you lose the offspring of the wildlife that die, then you lose multiple years of reproduction in the lost offspring,” she says. “It’s going to be an incredibly long time for the ecosystem to get back to where it was.”

While many have been moved to volunteer their time to help, the American Veterinary Medical Association warns against going to the Gulf Coast on your own. Instead, you are advised to register for the American Association of Zoo Veterinarians’ (AAZV) database of volunteers (visit www.avma.org for more information). Dr. Taylor says while registering for a Para professional database is the right way to get involved, the agencies handling the wildlife rescue are not currently looking for help. “They’re actually requesting that we don’t have people down there partly because of licensure. Right now we have it covered,” says Dr. Taylor. Instead, she recommends veterinarians who want to help look for ways to help with smaller-scale problems in their own communities by contacting their local wildlife and rehabilitation centers and animal shelters. She says those who want to be prepared to help with larger disasters should go through Hazardous Waste Operations and Emergency Response (HAZWOPER) training. “You have to be HAZWOPER trained in order to deal with any contaminant issues on a spill or in order to handle oiled birds. We want people to be protected.”

For continued updates on wildlife rescue efforts along the Gulf Coast, go to www.tristatebird.org.

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