Dave Lee on the Oil Geyser

1. We need a complete inventory of oil spill mortality for birds washing up on beaches and for birds collected on the water near the slicks. This inventory should include the species, sex and by the age of the bird. This information will help with future modeling of demographics for long-term recovery efforts.
2. Clean up and care of the birds is costly in time and money, so we need people to identify rare species and move them to the front of the line in the rescue centers that are set up. Coastal species will be the ones most frequently encountered by people on the beach, and in most cases these are going to be (at this time of year) birds that are relatively common (Laughing Gulls, Double Crested Cormorants, etc.) We will never get a good sample of the mortality levels of the tropical pelagic species due to their distribution, currents and winds, but boats collecting oiled birds at sea and visits to seabirds colonies now would provide valuable data.
3. There needs to be a plan as to what to do with the birds that do recover, as this spill is so vast that turning them loose will simply result in their loss. As Will stated, the real impact will best be measured on nesting grounds, with abandoned eggs and hatchlings, inventories of colonies over the next 5 years, etc. David Wingate found that oiled tropicbird eggs in nests in Bermuda had a low hatch rate, and even seemingly minor oiling on feathers of the parents resulted in the loss of the nest. The failures were apparently a combination of egg failure and adult mortality.
   
4. Money for seabird conservation could be better spent on surveys and rehabilitation of rare species than spending hundreds of thousands trying to clean Laughing Gulls and similar species that will recover quickly, and on their own, from this disaster. I was disturbed by the oil spill/seabird workshops I attended because there was not any plan in place for priority species. In fact, the groups that run these programs are a business and their mission is to simply work up as many individuals as possible and then present a bill to the party responsible.

Workshop on Eradicating Invasive Species at Seabird Colonies in the Caribbean Region

Now that "An Inventory of the Breeding Seabirds of the Caribbean (Bradley and Norton, eds.)" has been published, the next step in the push to stop the mass extinction of seabirds from the Caribbean involves removing invasive species from islands. The techniques for removing rats, cats, goats, and other harmful exotics from island ecosystems have been carefully refined over the last 20 years, and the results of such work have been fantastic in terms of preventing extinctions on islands.

At the annual meeting of the Society for the Conservation and Study of Caribbean Birds (SCSCB) in Antigua (July 14-18, 2009), I will help lead a workshop on eradications along with Brad Keitt and Kirsty Swinnerton from the 501-C3 Island Conservation (Santa Cruz, CA), and Ann Sutton (Jamaica), Co-Chair of SCSCB's Seabird Working Group.

The workshop is tentatively scheduled for the 15th of July in the afternoon. We'll have presenations on what it takes to do an eradication, a preliminary look at seabird colonies in the West Indies and Caribbean where eradication would be feasible and ecologically beneficial, and an example of the process used to prioritize islands for eradiction and conduct an eradication in Micronesia. Then, we'll break up into geographic groups to talk about the roughly 450 seabird breeding sites that appear on initial investigation to be suitable for eradication. We've eliminated islands with large human populations (>500 people), significant marine shipping or docking operations (due to the inevitability of reintroduction), large size (>10,000 ha -- 24,700 acres), or those <20 m away from islands that have been eliminated (again, due to the inevitability of reintroduction).

This workshop will be one of the first at the meeting, and we hope to have 50-100 participants. If you're on the fence about attending the Antigua meeting, I hope you'll come and participate in our workshop and the meeting as a whole. If you're already planning to attend, please bring your notes on what you know about the presence of invasives around the Caribbean. Who knows, perhaps our next publication could be an inventory of invasive species on the islands of the Caribbean with you as an author for one of the chapters.