Mass losses of wildlife feared as oil slick approaches
Birds, marine animals are vulnerable to the oil spill resulting from last week’s explosion 
Agence France-Presse
2010-05-03 12:00 AM Its long, brown neck held firmly in a blue towel, the northern gannet struggled for freedom, unaware of how very lucky it is to have been found swimming in a sea of oil off the Louisiana coast. Most of the birds and marine animals which get caught by what is expected to be the worst oil spill in U.S. history will die in a matter of days or even hours. Once the sticky oil and tar coats their fur or feathers they lose any insulation against the wet, wind and sun. If they swallow or inhale the crude oil, it’ll eat away at their insides. Jay Holcomb is one of a handful of specialists who have set up a triage center in Fort Jackson, Louisiana to clean and treat rescued birds. The director of International Bird Rescue Research Center, he spent six months in Alaska treating birds oiled in the Exxon Valdez disaster. About 1,600 were rescued. At least 500,000 died. He’s hoping it won’t be that bad this time. It could, in fact, be much worse. Nobody knows when the oil will stop gushing from a deep water well cracked open after an explosion sank an offshore oil platform run by British Petroleum on April 22. The massive slick has spread to 9,000km2 (3,500 square miles) – about the size of Puerto Rico – and an estimated 200,000 gallons are leaking into the Gulf of Mexico every day. The coasts of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida are threatened and the first wave of oil is expected to inundate the fragile wetlands south of New Orleans. High tides and high winds can push the oil deep into the marshes, which are accessible only by boat and offer few footholds for rescue workers and plenty of places for the frightened animals to hide. Most of the birds are currently nesting on the shore, Holcomb said, which makes them more susceptible to the spill and makes it even harder to try to recover oiled birds. “We’ve had times when we’ve had to leave oiled birds because it would kill more birds to get them,” Holcomb told reporters touring the triage center. …
