On Sat, 3 Aug 1996 Alan_Mearns at hazmat.noaa.gov wrote:

> Yes, but did the oyster catchers suffer from the oil or, morelikely, the
> cleanup activity? In any case, there are a lot of ustercatchers at our
> sites this year.

Why the "but"? The answer is both. There was evidence of nesting
failure which occurred when the oil came ashore and was
at its worst, and/or when the cleanup activity was at its peak. Oiling
alone caused mortality of chicks in June and July. This was due
either to external oiling (we have actual observations of this) or
internal oiling due to prey contamination. The chick mortality was not
caused by the cleanup workers--they had left, leaving behind the
supposedly "cleaned", but still oiled shorelines.

Time (e.g., bacterial action) and tide combined to break down the oil on
intertidal shorelines, which recovered sufficiently to function as
habitat for oystercatchers, without benefit of the futile Exxon effort to
clean the intertidal zone.


Are you still studying oystercatchers after all this time, or are you
merely making incidental observations? If the former, I
suppose it is connected to the idea, which I argued long and hard against,
of doing something to clean up the still oiled mussel beds. One
such was to remove the mussels from the rocks, clean out the oil retained in
the byssal mats, then wire the mussels back to the rocks. Apart
from the added disturbance, there's another example of ecological fraud
perpetrated against the $1.1. billion restoration fund
that Exxon is paying to the public to compensate for the damages, that
could have been used for something more productive.

Brian Sharp
2234 NE 9th Av
Portland, Or 97212
503-287-6501
ecopers at teleport.COM