Laurin has been moved to Florida!
After less than a week at the Fort Jackson Oiled Bird Rehabilitation Center, Laurin was sent to Mobile AL on Monday, and then to Pensacola FL on Tuesday. There are four oiled bird response centers – each less than an hour or so from the next one – in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and the Florida panhandle. Not a particularly efficient use of resources, as each one needs a huge structure, lots of water, large pools and aviaries, and disposal systems for the oily water. Although it’s always good to get a bird into care sooner rather than later, this set-up seems prompted more by politics and driving birds across state lines (like they don’t FLY across them daily?) Each facility has staff, laborers (the massive set-ups can be put up in an amazingly quick amount of time), and volunteers.
Fort Jackson is the largest center, with the most staff, and Laurin enjoyed being there. The other centers are not as well staffed and in Pensacola, sort of the ‘forgotten’ facility for awhile, one woman (who literally hung a hammock in the office to sleep) was the lone rehabilitator until two people from Tri-State arrived the day before Laurin. Fort Jackson eased Laurin into the pool, as it were, with lots of supervision and a chance to get her feet wet in different areas. In Pensacola, she’s been thrown into the deep end and is coping very well. They don’t want her to go anywhere else! Laurin has one of the radio phones, so can be in constant contact with other staff in the huge space – definitely a sign of the responsibility they’ve given her.
The facility in Florida is half of an enormous warehouse, close to the train tracks. Although Laurin can hear the thunderstorms that are pelting the region, she hasn’t actually seen much of anything. She doesn’t hear much of the outside world (except the trains!) and doesn’t even know what the hurricane is doing at this point. They work longer hours at the Florida center, and it’s normal for her to get back after 9:00 pm to her hotel (where she has her own room – a nice change after sharing a room with 3 others in a house with 19 people!) The three miles between her hotel and the warehouse could be anywhere – just big box stores, fast food outlets, nothing to say she’s in Pensacola and not Cincinnati. The train is loud when it goes by, but doesn’t seem to phase the birds, of which there are about 100 at the moment in various stages of stabilization, washing, or recovery.
The species being treated at each of the two centers are a bit different. At Fort Jackson, she saw a few of every species but the majority were pelicans. In Florida, she’s seeing a ton of those other species that were only a few in number at the Louisiana center. Hundreds of pelicans in Louisiana, only two in Florida. A few gannets in Louisiana, but they are the majority in Florida. There are more wading birds – herons, even a really sad green heron covered in oil – and laughing gulls, even a heart-wrenching Canada goose with severe chemical burns.
Before Laurin left Fort Jackson, she spent a day assisting at a wash table. Because of her handling skills, she was doing the body holding (washing is often a three person job, one restraining the body, one the head, and one washing). A badly oiled gannet took 5 baths and 20 bottles of Dawn – and then they nearly lost him to the stress. The completely collapsed bird was taken to the drying room, given IV fluids, and eventually recovered.
Her last day in Louisiana, Laurin was put in charge of the drying room. She had not been looking forward to that as the feedback she’d gotten from two house mates was that it was ‘boring.’ However, that’s not what she would call it! Being completely in charge of a room full of birds in different stages of the drying process, constantly checking that one was not over-heating, that another was not dangerously hypothermic (too cold) from the bath, adjusting the dryers, providing fluids, keeping them all quiet … was enormously stressful, yet very rewarding.
She has also been in charge of ‘marinating’ birds. An ironic term, but the crude oil at this spill is so heavy, that the first step in the wash process is actually coating the birds in a light vegetable oil to help lift the crude off the feathers, before the actual wash in Dawn dish-washing liquid.
A Canada goose she washed in Florida on Tuesday was suffering from chemical burns, with feathers just falling out. They aren’t sure if it was just the crude that she got into, or something else as well. No one has done any studies on the effect of this much chemical dispersant, as it’s never been used to such an extent before. This bird is particularly heart-breaking, as she is so scared by everything she has had to go through that she just flattens herself to the ground if anyone approaches. However, she is resilient, as not long after Laurin administered IV fluids, she was up and eating!
Laurin has now been in the thick of it for about 10 days and at the morning meeting Thursday, she was told she could take a day off sometime in the coming week. In fact, she was offered either 2 days off together each two weeks, or one a week. Her response was that she’s not sure what she’d do with it! Staff who had been there longer all said, ‘Sleep!’ She’s also not sure she’ll be stationed there long enough to take advantage of a day off, but the Tri-State staff have said they weren’t going to let her go.
She enjoyed Fort Jackson, feels she did well there and hopes to end up there – but it’s been really good to connect with the Tri-State folks as well. She has met one Tri-State contract worker who is actually a teacher but works spills for Tri-State every summer and Christmas break. There are so many smaller spills that we never hear about – enough to keep permanent full-time Tri-State staff working only on spills, as well as some contract workers every vacation. This teacher keeps a ‘kit’ of her own rubber boots, gloves, apron, and bandannas – ready to roll!
A the Gulf spill continues into its third month, each state is developing its own response protocol. In the Florida panhandle, they have divided the coast into sections and each section has an oiled wildlife response team, with vans and teams of drivers and handlers ready to respond to calls about wildlife found. Mississippi, Alabama and Florida seem to be working with US Fish & Wildlife on the rescue end of things in a much more cooperative fashion than in Louisiana.
So much else is going on that Laurin only hears peripherally – an effort is about to get underway to move something like 70,000 turtle eggs from about 800 nests in nests in Alabama and Florida. They don’t want the baby turtles to hatch and head straight out to the oiled Gulf, to pretty much certain death – thus losing an entire generation. But the eggs are very delicate and moving them without jostling the embryo is also risky. They will be dug up, placed in custom-designed cartons, packed with sand, and carefully driven to a climate-controlled warehouse on the Atlantic coast.
On the home front, we are hanging in there but missing Laurin. We three staff members tend to operate as a team, each with our own specialty areas but a lot of overlap where we can replace each other … but some of the ‘irreplaceable Laurin’ holes are beginning to show up! Kit and Louise are definitely enjoying having the three part-time staff, Brian, Carrie, and Hannah, and could easily get spoiled and Kit is really liking having office space that’s NOT in the gift shop… Babies continue to trickle in.
Stay tuned – next time Laurin has to do laundry, I expect to get another call!
Louise Shimmel
Executive Director
