Mysterious Oil Patches Take Big Toll on Seabirds

A mysterious weeklong oil leak off Southern California has damaged more wildlife than any spill in state coastal waters since 1990, officials said Thursday as they struggled to find its source.

Dead or oiled seabirds are now turning up on beaches from Santa Barbara to Huntington Beach, with estimates that as many as 5,000 birds may have been coated with the black goo. So far, nearly 1,400 birds have been retrieved since the first grebes washed ashore in Ventura County a week ago.

What makes the situation so perplexing is that wildlife officials are overrun by birds, but have not found a major telltale slick on the water or tar balls washing ashore.

“It’s a tough nut to crack,” said Dana Michaels, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Fish and Game. “It’s not like there’s a big slick someplace and we can say, ‘That’s the responsible party.’ This is a real mystery.”

Not knowing where the leak is coming from makes it impossible for experts to determine how much oil is out there and for people treating the injured wildlife to know whether the worst is over.

“Just because you don’t see a broken ship doesn’t mean there aren’t huge impacts on wildlife,” said Jonna Mazet, a UC Davis veterinarian who is leading the rescue effort at the Oiled Bird Care and Education Center in San Pedro.

At first, state officials, who surveyed the area by air Saturday, suspected a natural release of oil from the seafloor in the oil-rich Santa Barbara Channel.

Then a photo circulated by e-mail showed an oil slick extending off Platform Holly, just offshore from UC Santa Barbara. But a State Lands Commission inspector found no evidence of a leak from the platform, and a sample of the slick did not match the oil recovered from feathers.

Because the oiled birds turned up soon after last week’s record rains, investigators have been tracking reports of broken oil lines undermined by erosion or severed in mudslides. So far, no oil from any reported breaks has reached the ocean.

Another theory holds that capped oil wells inland, or on the seafloor, may have been damaged in recent storms, unleashing crude oil into coastal waters. But oil companies have reported no problems to authorities, as is required by state and federal law.

Meanwhile, chemists at a state laboratory near Sacramento are trying to analyze samples of oily residue collected from bird feathers; from the banks of the Santa Clara River, which enters the ocean near Oxnard; and from a weather buoy three miles offshore from the mouth of the river.

It is slow and painstaking work to develop the chemical fingerprint and match it against those in the state’s library of samples collected from ships, oil platforms and other sources, said Michaels, who works for the Fish and Game Department’s Office of Spill Prevention and Response.

Further complicating matters, she said, is that the oil from birds has degraded from the weather, making it more difficult to analyze. So far chemists have been unable to determine if oil on the birds’ feathers is crude or refined.

The closest match is consistent with a natural seepage from a spot called Coal Oil Point on the UC Santa Barbara campus at Isla Vista, she said.

Officials said the spill has damaged more wildlife than any other spill in California coastal waters in 15 years, when 3,400 birds died after the 1990 American Trader spill off the Orange County coast.

Mazet said the toll of this leak could exceed the American Trader spill and be the worst in California involving marine life since 1986, when a barge sloshed oil into San Francisco Bay, killing 10,500 seabirds.

Of the nearly 1,400 damaged birds picked up by veterinarians, rescuers and volunteers in the last week, 612 were dead or so sick they had to be euthanized. Wildlife experts know they find only a fraction of the seabirds killed or injured in oil spills, and Mazet estimated that as many as 5,000 birds have been harmed by this latest incident.

In the 2002 wreck of the tanker Prestige off the coast of Spain, 63,000 tons of fuel oil was leaked, killing an estimated 250,000 seabirds. Yet only about 840 oiled birds were ever found, said veterinarian Michael Ziccardi, director of UC Davis’ Oiled Wildlife Care Network.

“In Spain, we recovered 508 birds alive and 320 dead in three weeks,” Ziccardi said. “Here in California, we have recovered that many birds in three days.”

At least 90% of injured birds collected so far are Western grebes, large black-and-white birds with long, thin, yellow bills that they use to catch small fish just offshore. This time of year, Western grebes are often seen along the Pacific Coast from Alaska to central Mexico.

Ziccardi, a veteran of oiled bird rescue operations, said the large number of injured birds points to either a large spill or a concentration of “unlucky birds that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Western grebes tend to congregate on the open sea in large “rafts,” and one state fish and game official reported spotting 1,000 grebes on the water near Oxnard right before the trouble started and another 1,000 off Malibu.

Other oil-soaked seabirds that have been treated include Clark’s grebes, eared grebes, loons, brown pelicans, a Brandt’s cormorant and a surf scoter.

At first, oiled birds were found along an area stretching from Santa Barbara to Venice, but the danger zone was extended Thursday to Orange County after oily birds were discovered in Huntington Beach.

Investigators with the state Office of Spill Prevention and Response say they haven’t ruled out any potential sources.

Experts note that there are some 1,500 sunken vessels along the California coast with about 750 off central California, some of them with millions of gallons of fuel oil in their holds.

Officials are considering using an underwater surveillance robot to take pictures to help in the investigation.

State officials have asked for federal assistance from the U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The federal government has not yet agreed to take over the investigation, which would assure federal funding.

The spill comes as federal officials are reviewing environmental documents that could allow oil companies to extend their leases on 36 offshore tracts from Oxnard to San Luis Obispo for future oil drilling.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has been encouraging the Bush administration to buy back these leased tracts, which have been undeveloped for decades.

And oil industry lobbyists have been urging Congress and the Bush administration to lift an oil-drilling ban that covers nearly all federal waters off California, except for specific areas already producing oil. Those areas are marked by oil platforms, most of them in the Santa Barbara Channel and off Huntington Beach.

Meanwhile, rescue officials say more volunteers are needed to help care for the injured birds at the San Pedro center.