---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 16 Sep 1994 11:25:02 -0700
From: Alan Richards <alanr at ednet1.osl.or.gov>

Dan -- thought this might be of interest -- haven't seen it on tweeters.

This is my transcription of an AP Wire Service story, from
August 3, 1994, which I thought would be of general interest.

-- Alan Richards / Naselle WA

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Deformed Birds -- Wild Birds Showing Up
With Deformities, Cause Unknown

-- by JEFF BARNARD -- Associated Press Writer

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GRANTS PASS, Ore. (AP) - In 21 years of caring for sick and
injured birds, Dave Siddon had never seen anything like it.

Over the past two months, eight birds have been brought into the
Wildlife Images rehabilitation center from around the Rogue
Valley with crossed bills, missing eyes, or both. They include
two red-tailed hawks, an osprey, three kestrels, a Brewer's blackbird
and a robin.

"About three years ago we had a red-tailed hawk come in with
a crossed bill," said Siddon. "But this is the first time we've ever had
this number of birds come in with such obvious physical anomalies."

Among them is a red-tailed hawk with a crossed bill and missing
one eye, including the orbital bone around the eye. It has been kept
alive through force feeding. Tissue and blood samples from this
bird could provide the best clues to solving the mystery.

But the answer is likely complex. Red-tailed hawks eat small
mammals, osprey prey on fish, and robins eat worms and fruit,
suggesting that if some contaminant is causing the deformities,
it is not limited to one place.

"If you are finding a wide range of animals feeding on a number
of different things, that is pretty unusual, and certainly of concern,"
said Don Steffeck, chief of the environmental contaninants division
at U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Portland. "Unfortunately, there
is not any one element of contamination that can cause these."

The prospect of some kind of pollution worries Arnie Abrams,
who found the red-tailed hawk with the crossed bill and missing eye in
his backyard in Ashland.

"I would sit out here on the deck in my backyard and look up with my
binoculars at the nest and think about how good life is in southern
Oregon," Abrams said. "Maybe now it makes you think about how
bad things can be."

The deformities bring to mind two well-known cases of birth
defects among birds: double-crested cormorants with crossed bills that
started appearing in great numbers in the Great Lakes in the 1970s,
and the variety of deformed waterfowl on the Kesterson Nat'l Wildlife
Refuge in central California in the 1980s.

Siddon's birds don't appear to match those from Kesterson, said
Joe Skorupa, senior biologist in the environmental contaminants division
for the USFWS in Sacramento, CA.

The deformities among the Kesterson birds were traced to the
naturally occurring metal selenium, which was concentrated in irrigation
water running off farms by evaporation. When female birds were
exposed to high concentrations of selenium a week before laying their
eggs, their young hatched with no eyes, missing lower bills, deformed
upper bills, or deformed legs and feet.

"I would be looking for some kind of organochlorine," said Skorupa.
That would point to chemicals such as polycholorinated biphenyls,
better known as PCBs.

PCBs were once commonly put in oil in electrical transformers to
prevent fires. They have since been outlawed for their toxicity. But spills
and dumping have left them widespread around the nation.

When they get in the body, they can mimic the female hormone
estrogen. That can cause defornities, as well as make males act
like females.

Brent Palmer, an assistant professor of microanantomy at Ohio
University, has been working with double-breasted cormorants exposed
to PCBs around Green Bay, Wisc., on Lake Superior. Many of the birds
have crossed bills and other anomalies related to estrogen mimcking.

"To get the crossed bills and missing eyes, if it is a pollution
induced effect, there had to be a lot of pollution," involved with the
Oregon birds, Palmer said.

"What makes this stuff so insidious is that when you see these
gross changes in animals' appearance, that may be just the tip of
the iceberg," he added. "We have other populations of animals
like alligators in Florida, where the adults grow up normally, but their
reproduction is impaired. The habitat looks wonderful, the adults look
fine, but they cannot sustain their population, so you have the potential
for a true environmental tragedy."

Ralph Quincy, a volunteer at Wildlife Images, is arranging to send
the surviving red-tailed hawk to Oregon Health Sciences University's
veterinary medicine lab in Portland, where blood and tissue samples
could be scanned for abnormalities and toxins.

Finding out the contaminant that caused the deformities still leaves
open the question of where it came from, said Steffeck.

There might even be some natual condition, such as malnutrition, to
explain the deformities, said Skorupa.

"It sounds like the canaries trying to tell us something in the mine
shaft," said Skorupa. "Maybe we ought to start opening our eyes a
little wider, sniffing under stones, and trying to figure out what the
canaries are trying to tell us. They are our early warning system."
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