Oil spill update from the field: Grand Isle beach is smothered in oil and birds are feeding in it

By Justin Nobel05/23/2010 Grand Isle, Louisiana A semipalmated sandpiper pitter patters down the beach, feeding from sand laced with sticky red puddles of oil. The bird has red smeared across its flanks and face. Nearby, a flock of sanderlings pecks for worms and mollusks. The sand they’re feeding from is riddled with globs of oil […]

Oil spill brings ‘death in the ocean from top to bottom’

By Frank Pope It has been an hour since our sport-fishing boat started streaking through the freshly oil-soaked marshes of Pass a Loutre, but we’re still only halfway through the slick. Eighteen miles out and the stink of oil is everywhere. Rashes of red-brown sludge are smeared across vast swaths, between them a swell rendered […]

Louisiana coast's battle against drifting oil expected to last months, if not years

By Bob Marshall, The Times-PicayuneMay 23, 2010, 9:00AM For those saddened by the scenes of thick oil washing into Louisiana’s coastal wetlands a month after the BP oil disaster began, experts on oil spills and the coastal ecosystem have some advice: Get used to it. The crews mopping up oil on beaches and marsh shorelines […]

Oil spill threatens nesting pelicans in Louisiana

Nesting pelicans are seen landing as oil washes ashore on an island that is home to hundreds of brown pelican nests as well at terns, gulls and roseated spoonbills in Barataria Bay, just inside the the coast of Louisiana, Saturday, May 22, 2010. Oil from the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill is now impacting large […]

Louisiana fishermen contemplating suicide, need mental health services

Written by WGNO ABC26 News | Friday, 21 May 2010 14:00 he situation in the gulf is getting so dire for some in the seafood industry, they’ve thought about committing suicide. Steps to intervene are underway. Desperation is setting in in Southeast Louisiana. “I spoke to a group of fishermen, mainly Vietnamese Americans and a […]

Cleaning oil-soaked wetlands may be impossible

By MATTHEW BROWN (AP) NEW ORLEANS — The gooey oil washing into the maze of marshes along the Gulf Coast could prove impossible to remove, leaving a toxic stew lethal to fish and wildlife, government officials and independent scientists said. Officials are considering some drastic and risky solutions: They could set the wetlands on fire […]

Graph of the Day: Latitudinal movement of US bird species by habitat, 1960s-2006

Christmas Bird Count (CBC) show that the warmer winters in recent decades have played an important role in shifting winter bird ranges to the north. CBC data from the mid-1960s through 2006 show that 170 (56%) of the 305 most widespread, regularly occurring species have shifted their ranges to the north, whereas only 71 species […]

Report on failure to halt wildlife decline is buried

  By Michael McCarthy, Environment EditorSaturday, 22 May 2010 A report showing that Britain is failing to halt the declines of many of its highest-priority wildlife species and habitats, from the red squirrel, the juniper and the common skate to chalk rivers and coastal salt marshes, was “sneaked out” this week by the Government with […]

Carp poisoning begins amid calls for stronger action

By Eartha Jane Melzer 5/21/10 11:17 AM Federal officials closed a portion of the Chicago canal system this week and began poisoning the waters with rotenone in order to kill any invasive Asian carp that may have made it across an electric fish barrier intended to keep them out of Lake Michigan. The Detroit Free […]

Boom, trawlers deployed in St. Bernard Parish to combat oil spill

By Bob Warren, The Times-Picayune May 21, 2010, 4:28PM St. Bernard Parish officials on Friday announced a two-pronged effort to combat the potential spread of oil into parish marshes. A BP subcontractor on Wednesday began driving two parallel rows of 60-foot, 8-inch pilings some 500 feet apart off the coast, according to a parish news […]

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