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Oiled Bird Fixes

Rehabilitating oiled birds isn't easy, and many don't make it through the exhausting ordeal. But a new state-of-the-art facility that opened last year in Cordelia may increase their chance of survival.

In past spills, volunteers often scrambled to help birds using makeshift facilities. In contrast, the new San Francisco Bay Oiled Wildlife Care and Education Center has a 10,000-square-foot wildlife hospital with areas for intake, holding, washing and

drying, food preparation and medical treatment. Eventually the center, also a new home for the International Bird Rescue Research Center which rehabilitates injured birds, will have two large rehab pools and several aviaries.

A better solution, however, is preventing birds from becoming oiled in the first place. California has a dedicated bird hazing program that uses everything from shiny Mylar tape tied onto stakes (for spills in mudflats) to bird "bombs" that replicate the sounds of fireworks and laser lights to scare birds away from spills. In addition, two new, more complicated, devices are being evaluated for use in S.F. Bay. The Breco Bird Scarer blasts high-intensity sounds from inside a 79-pound buoy. The buoy is designed to drift with the oil and broadcast sounds - ranging from barking dogs to sirens - over a 72-hour period. Another device, the Phoenix Wailer, blasts sounds of up to 140 decibels from a box atop four sprawling legs attached to large floats. The Wailer, which has been used by San Francisco International Airport for years, can be programmed to make the sounds more random and less easy for the birds to adjust to. The sounds can also be played from alternating speakers to give the impression they are coming from different directions.

So far, tests performed on the Breco by U.C. Davis researchers have had disappointing results, perhaps because Bay birds are used to lots of background noise, says researcher Desley Whisson. Whisson thinks the Wailer, which is undergoing more Bay tests this season, will be more successful because it is louder, makes more of a visual impact and uses more natural sounds. "If anything's going to work, this one will," says Whisson.

Contact: Care Center (707) 207-0380 or Desley Whisson (530) 754-8644 LOV

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