Bird Mortality in Oil & Gas Fields

oiled bird/ US Fish & Wildlife Service

Pepper Trail may be the only full-time forensic ornithologist. He works for the National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Lab in Ashland, Oregon. On November 3 he visited the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to talk about the sort of work he does.

Trail documents evidence of crimes against birds. That can include anything from smuggling endangered species to trade in feathered craft items. One of the most common kinds of evidence he gets – accounting for a quarter to a third of all his cases – is oiled birds.

These birds often come from oil pits and waste pits located at drilling sites, Trail said. Companies are supposed to make their waste pits inaccessible to birds, but in most cases the their attempts fall far short of the law. Some look like wetlands, with oily water spread over reedy areas, while others are well-defined rectangular ponds. Both attract birds.

Trail doesn’t visit drilling sites, so he can’t say exactly where the birds are coming from or whether the driller is fracking for gas or oil. It’s the job of field investigators to fish dead birds from the oily depths and send them in. Trail’s job is to clean the feathers – tail feathers are best, he says – and look for distinguishing characteristics. So he washes them with solvent, gives them a rinse and then dries them off with a hair-drier.

Waterfowl aren’t the only birds attracted to gas and oil waste pits. Trail has identified 172 species, including mocking bird, barn owl, lark buntings and even roadrunners. “The mortality due to gas and oil pits is in the range of 500,000 to a million every year,” he said. To put that in perspective, the Exxon-Valdez oil spill killed 250,000 to 300,000 birds. Wind turbines account for about 100,000 bird deaths each year.

 “This is some of the most important work we do,” said Trail. “Not because the fines are high, but because we can compel the companies to clean up their pits.”

flags don't adequately protect birds from waste pits

The current strategy of surrounding the pit with chain-link fence or stringing used-car-lot flags across the surface is totally inadequate. “The best way to protect birds is to pump out the pits and inject the fluids into storage tanks that are closed,” said Trail, adding that an alternative would be injecting waste into a geological formation – “if that’s safe.” Securely netting the pond could work, but too often the netting sags into the oil.

You can learn more about minimizing risks to migrating birds at oil and gas sites here.  This was taken from a longer article in the November 10, 2014 issue of Tompkins Weekly

Deer, Drilling and other Wildlife Considerations

Page 40 in Mar 13 Mulligan Shopping Guide

In a recent gas industry ad, hunter and sportsman Alan Probst proclaims that natural gas drilling will benefit wildlife.

On the one hand, he’s right. The pipeline right-of-ways that cut through forests, will need to be kept free of trees for as long as the gas shall run. And as all deer hunters know, those right-of-ways make great habitat for deer.

What he doesn’t say is what everyone already knows: we already have too many deer for the hunters to keep up with, and that deer population has tremendous and far-reaching impacts on our forests.

If you grow a garden, or walk in the woods, you already know this. When is the last time you saw young tree seedlings in your woods? According to Bernd Blossey, associate professor in Cornell University’s Department of Natural Resources, it takes ten years for an oak seedling to grow tall enough to survive deer browsing. Most don’t make it past two.

He cites a research project in the Allegheny National Forest that demonstrated some of the impacts of deer on the landscape. Instead of excluding deer from areas, scientists enclosed deer inside of fences. That way they could control the population density of the herds. After tabulating tree regeneration for a decade the researchers found a clear relationship between deer pressure and the diversity of trees in their enclosures: a more diverse population of tree seedlings grew where there were fewer deer; more deer led to a less diverse forest.

Bad enough news for those depending on the back-forty woodlot to regenerate itself in a sustainable manner for the next generation… But the impacts go beyond timber interests. The researchers also looked at caterpillar populations in the various enclosures. Where the deer density was low, there was a high population of caterpillars; more deer meant fewer caterpillars. And that has huge implications for the forest-dwelling birds that depend on caterpillars to feed their nestlings. Some studies find an abundance of birds in the forest canopies, but few in the mid-story and shrubs.

And aren’t birds wildlife too, Alan?