WICBirds.net is down right now

If you're looking for WICBirds.net, it is down temporarily. I apologize for this delay. It's a problem with the Verizon-Yahoo breakup. I'll have it up ASAP. Until then, if you would like to see Dave Lee's identification guide for birds in the gulf, email me and I will send it to you electronically. Likewise for any information about the breeding sites.

Oil Drilling Off North Carolina

David Lee, the co-editor of this blog, has been studying the seabirds of the North Atlantic since before I was born, literally. As curator of birds at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, he spent thousands of hours observing and collecting seabirds off the coast of North Carolina, and he discovered, among other things, that the productive fishing area off of Hatteras Island called "The Point" by fishermen is also a critical feeding area for the rarest seabirds in the Atlantic Ocean, including Fea's Petrels from Cape Verde and Madeira, Trinidade Petrels which breed 7,700 Km to the southeast, at Trinidade and Martin Vaz Islands, Bermuda Petrels, which were thought to be extinct for 300 years until a handful were discovered nesting on offshore rocks in Bermuda, and Black-Capped Petrels, which once nested on islands around the Caribbean and are now hanging on in Haiti by nesting in inaccessible cliffs hundreds of meters in the air.

Since the 1980's, oil companies have been lobbying to open the continental slope of North Carolina including "The Point" to drilling, and Dave has been a leading voice of opposition. Here's an article from the Wilmington Star-News in 1989. Note that oil drillers have used the same lines about safe drilling for years. Let's hope this idea of opening North Carolina's Outer Banks to offshore drilling will now go away in light of the Horizon disaster, but I'm not holding my breath.

Projected Path of Surface Oil mirrors the path of Shearwaters

If it behaves like the virtual dye simulated in this study, the surface oil will be lingering exactly in the primary foraging area for August and September of Audubon's Shearwaters and White-tailed Tropicbirds, along with Black-Capped Petrels, Bermuda Petrels, and other rare seabirds. It should also show up in the Cay Sal Bank and the coast of Cuba. All the East Coast beaches and fisheries to Cape Hatteras will also get high concentrations of fouled water with PAHs that can linger and contaminate animals like shrimp and oysters long after the tar balls are gone. This model can't account for storms or fronts. Where the huge plumes of undersea oil will go is another question entirely.