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.