Pelicans again play follow-the-leader down the beach, and gulls swoop in flocks above the sand.
The calendar, not the successful capping of the Deepwater Horizon oil well, has brought the birds back to South Mississippi, experts say.
The pelicans and gulls that left to go to their northern breeding grounds are returning with their young. Adding to that, migration is on, said Mark LaSalle, director of the Pascagoula River Audubon Center in Moss Point. “There are lots of birds around.”
He and Ron Blackwell, the Sun Herald’s birding columnist, say they can’t tell if there are fewer birds than in past years, or how many died while oil poured into the Gulf.
“We know that we lost pelicans during the oil spill,” Blackwell said.
“We lost a lot of birds,” LaSalle said, but maybe not as many as was expected.
What was unexpected is the way people started paying attention to the birds when they saw oiled pelicans and realized the danger to the wildlife.
“It’s engaging people,” said LaSalle, who created the Coastal Bird Survey and began training the scores of volunteers who called to help. He said 80 percent of the people they are training are new to birding.
They are learning how to identify oiled birds, although LaSalle said it is difficult to catch and treat even a heavily oiled bird.
“We have no idea of what their fate was,” he said of the birds seen covered in oil after the spill. “Is a little oil bad? We don’t know.”
Despite oil spilled from a barge near the islands where the birds roost two or three years ago, “the pelican population was still robust enough they were taken off the endangered species list,” LaSalle said.
Capping the oil well doesn’t mean the birds are out of danger.
“It’s really not over yet,” said Blackwell, who estimates it will take a couple of years to know the impact of the oil on the birds.
The songbirds are just starting to migrate through South Mississippi, and he said, “We don’t know what that dynamic will be.” There are songbirds that feed along the Coast and need a good habitat.
“Some birds probe the sand to get the organisms in there,” he said. With oil trapped under the sand, there may not be as many flying north come spring.
LaSalle said gulls and other birds that fly as far as the Arctic in the summer are returning to the Coast. “This is where they’re going to spend the winter,” he said, and when the volunteers provide numbers from December’s Christmas Bird Count and the Great Backyard Bird Count in February, it may tell how the birds are faring.
Tourists and residents may not have returned to the beaches in pre-spill numbers, but Blackwell said, “It’s great to see the birds.”
For another story from The Sun Herald about the Ohr-O'Keefe Museum go to:
http://visitmscoast.xanga.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment