They had come off the endangered species list only months ago, the success story of a species rebounding after brutal overhunting and DDT poisoning.
The pelicans packed onto a small island, inches apart, pairs sitting on mound nests on the ground, fearless. It was evening on Louisiana’s California Bay, and the setting sun made the grass look as green as anything in this world. I’d seen the Brown Pelicans at peace, just two weeks before the fog of madness began to seep in. Oiled Brown Pelicans wait to be cleaned in June 2010, at a rescue center in Fort Jackson, Louisiana.
#DEEPWATER HORIZON OIL SPILL SKIN#
The muscular, seafaring Northern Gannets left triangular gashes on the forearms of people who offered them help they couldn’t understand, but the pelicans were patient as their eyeballs and palates were swabbed, quiet as their skin and feathers were scrubbed. They are gentle toward humans, even under stress, the wildlife rehabilitators would tell me. The edge of our world is the beginning of theirs. It looked like a form of insanity-I suppose it was-and I still think about the sight with a strangling sense of horror.īrown Pelicans are highly social beings, flying together in tight, graceful formations and nesting noisily by the hundreds on sheltered islands on the fringes of coasts, feeding at sea. That was the tic that caught your eye, Brown Pelicans stuck in an endless preening loop, unable to save themselves but unable to stop trying. They preened, grabbing feather clumps in enormous bills and tugging over and over again. So the pelicans responded the only way they could.
Then you saw that their belly feathers hung clumped and matted, looking wet, only this was oil.įeathers protect birds from a world that is by turns too hot, too cold, too wet, too sunny-but oiled feathers can’t do their job. They looked almost normal at first, but an odd behavioral tic drew your gaze back to them. The first oiled pelicans I saw that spring didn’t look like the ones they put on TV. What has transpired because of these horrific events? And what can we carry forward? -The Editors We asked them to reflect on the spill’s political and personal legacy. Each of the voices featured in this special package watched the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe unfold, and witnessed the repercussions to people and birds, but took away different lessons. The Gulf holds all of these possibilities-tragedy, resilience, and hope. For example, this winter the state of Louisiana rebuilt Queen Bess Island, an eroding pelican rookery-thereby helping it avoid the fate of nearby Cat Island, which has already disappeared. With partners, it’s now ensuring many of those projects are advancing. In 2019 Audubon provided a roadmap for investing nearly $2 billion of this pot to shore up key habitats through 30 projects covering more than 136,000 acres. Today BP penalty funds flowing to the region provide an enormous opportunity to not only repair environmental damages from that disaster, but also help restore a long-suffering Gulf Coast.
Many of us remember the distress we felt as that day stretched into days, then months-a slow-building dread that no one could make a gaping hole drilled into the earth stop gushing. waters began with a deadly explosion on April 20, 2010.
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