Canadian migratory birds, fish at risk from oil spill
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Several migratory birds species that make their summer home in Canada’s Arctic and East Coast, as well as the already endangered Atlantic blue fin tuna, are at risk because of the massive oil spill off Louisiana’s Gulf Coast.
And it may never be known how many of these birds and fish will survive the spill, said Craig Stewart, director of the Arctic Program for the World Wildlife Fund, in an interview with the Star. “Several hundred thousand birds may be lost,” become victims of the oil spill, he said. And untold numbers of tuna will simply disappear.
Sandpipers and plovers, including red knots — the latter of which is already on an endangered list on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature — all winter in South America and make their way to Canada’s Arctic and each spring. But first they stage — or gather — on the Louisiana coast to eat and rest before they head north.
These birds were on the coast when the spill occurred, Stewart said. It’s not clear how many were directly affected or if they escaped and headed north before the oil began to wash ashore, said Stewart. He estimates that, like the Exxon Valdez spill 20 years ago, more than 200,000 shore and sea birds could be affected.
How many have died is anybody’s guess and wildlife experts may never get a firm handle on the number. “There is a sense that a number of them have already been oiled, ” said Stewart, who has done research into what would happen in Canadian waters if an oil spill occurred in Arctic waters or off the East Coast. Other birds and fish will simply become part of a great wave of “the disappeared.” More than 100,000 sandpipers and plovers go through the Louisiana coast on their way north every year, Stewart said.
But equally worrying, said Stewart, is the migratory birds’ journey home this coming fall. The coastal shore of Louisiana is a staging area for their trip south as well. If the oil, which has seeped into the marshland, isn’t cleaned up by the time the birds that escaped the spill the first time head south, the remaining oil could kill even more, he explained. “We have to prevent as much as possible the oil from getting into marshes, which will be difficult in hurricane season,” said Stewart.
Also at risk are northern gannets, sea-feeding birds that live in the Gulf region during the winter and migrate to Canada’s Atlantic coast in the summer, making their home off the coast of Newfoundland and the Maritime Provinces in large colonies on cliffs. “They are particularly susceptible to the spill because that's where they live in the fall and winter and they feed out in the sea and dive into the water and get oiled."
Experts don’t know how many northern gannets left for the coastal waters of Canada’s Atlantic coast before the spill, but suggest many would have been killed by the oil as it seeped into the sea because the birds feed at sea. “Our sense is many perished at sea,” Stewart explained.
The Atlantic blue fin tuna, which every summer heads up to the eastern shores of the Maritime Provinces, spawn in the Gulf of Mexico right in the region of the spill, said Stewart. Already endangered because they are overharvested for sushi, the Atlantic blue fin tuna stock may be reduced even further because of the oil spill, part of a wave of wildlife lost forever.
And the impact on Canadian wildlife could be even worse if suggestions that the oil spill, if it gets caught in the loop current, might heads farther north past the Florida Keys and up the east coast.
“It’s possible some of the oil could be distributed in Canadian waters,” said Stewart. “But it’s all speculation at this point in time.”
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