TsengBPDisasterResearchAnnotation2

What’s the Worth? –Bird Cleaning after the Oil Spill  Cleaning up the birds after an oil spill takes a lot, perhaps a lot more than a village. Here are a couple of articles and paragraphs that talk about the effort that goes into the bird-cleaning, how effective it is and what the true cost of an oil spill.  “…de-oiling contaminated seabirds has generally been viewed as an animal welfare issue, with little conservation value. Proponents of this view argue that de-oiling has little if any impact at the population level due to: 1) the low proportion of oiled birds that are caught alive in a condition that allows them to enter the de-oiling process; 2) limited success of the de-oiling and treatment process resulting in poor release rates from the rehabilitation centre; 3) low survival rates of de-oiled birds after their return to the wild; 4) little evidence of meaningful numbers of de-oiled birds surviving to reproduction; and 5) impaired reproductive performance compared with un-oiled birds (for those birds that do breed)….” (See full article [|here])  The author is [|Dr. Anton Wolfaardt] , who is currently based in the Falkland Islands working for the Joint Nature Conservation Committee of the UK as the ACAP (Agreement on the Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels) coordinator for the UK South Atlantic Overseas Territories, which include the Falkland Islands, South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands, Tristan da Cunha and the British Antarctic Territories. Dr. Wolfaardt’s paper was published in 2005, after a decade of study and follow-up on the African Penguin’s clean-up effort after the spill of [|Apollo Sea’s oil spill]  near Cape of Good Hope, South Africa, in 1994. The importance of this article is that BP has not learned much, if anything at all, from the history. If BP is still trying to focus on reviving the [|local ecology for the walruses], there will be nothing learned, and the history will just keep repeating itself and the walruses would not be the only animal that disappeared from the environment near any oil drilling activities.   References: <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">1. Wolfaardt, Anton: **<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Does cleaning oiled seabirds have conservation value? Insights from the South African experience with African Penguins **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">, <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';"> Cape Nature and the Avian Demography Unit, University of Cape Town <span style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">2. Animal Demographic Unit, JNCC and ACAP <span style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">3. Apollo Sea Oil Spill Environmental Facts, <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">[] <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;"> <span style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">4. C-span’s video coverage-Walrus <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">[] <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;"> <span style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">