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Loose Feathers #242

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Birds and birding news
Birds in the blogosphere
Oil Spill

Environment and biodiversity
Blog carnivals
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I and the Bird

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I and the Bird #127 is online at The Drinking Bird.





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Flies in the Backyard

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With over 17,000 species on this continent alone, flies (order Diptera) come in many shapes and sizes. Here are a few that I recently found in the backyard.

On warm days, one can usually see tiny metallic-colored flies flitting among the leaves of vegetation. Many of these are long-legged flies (family Dolichopodidae). These are predatory flies that eat smaller insects like aphids. The individual below is probably from the genus Condostylus.

Here is another long-legged fly. This one is smaller, and its color is gold instead of green, but it has the same basic body shape.

Other flies that frequent vegetation include the dance flies (family Empididae). I believe that this fly is part of that family, though I am not sure of the species or even genus.

Finally, my favorite of the recent group is this insect, which was attracted to the light at the back door. This is a midge, probably in the genus Chironomus. The plumelike antennae are especially striking at such a small scale. The grid lines on the paper form one-eighth-inch squares. Though they superficially resemble mosquitos, Chironomid midges do not bite people.


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A Much Larger Oil Spill, and Underwater Plumes Confirmed

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The last few days have seen some developments in the ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. BP claims to be capturing 10,000 barrels of oil per day with the containment cap that it installed on the riser last week. However, video of the riser pipe has shown little discernible reduction in the amount of oil flowing out of the pipe from around the cap. This has led some experts to argue that oil is flowing through the riser at a rate much closer to the 100,000 barrels a day predicted in BP's worst-case scenario than to the 12,000 to 25,000 barrels per day estimated by government scientists.
Leifer said that based on satellite data he's examined, the rate of flow from the well has been increasing over time, especially since BP's "top kill" effort failed last month to stanch the flow. The decision last week to sever the well's damaged riser pipe from the its blowout preventer in order to install a "top hat" containment device has increased the flow still more _ far more, Leifer said, than the 20 percent that BP and the Obama administration predicted....

The oil was not freely flowing before the top kill or before they cut the pipe, Leifer said, but once the riser pipe was cleared, there was little blocking the oil's rise to the top of the blowout preventer. Video images confirm that the flow of black oil is unimpeded.

"If the pipe behaved as a worst-case estimate you would have no visual change in the flow, and I don't see any obvious visual change," Leifer said. "How much larger I don't know but let's just quote BP."
Second, government scientists confirmed that there are subsurface plumes of oil, something that independent researchers had already discovered.
Jane Lubchenco, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said oil in "very low concentrations" was found at varying depths 40 miles and 42 nautical miles northeast of the well and also 142 nautical miles southeast of the well....

Dispersed oil "is not in a form that's easily removed," said Samantha Joye, a professor of marine sciences at the University of Georgia at Athens during a briefing she held on Tuesday about her latest research cruise in search of submerged oil.

Joye was one of the first scientists to discover submerged layers of oil, reports of which Lubchenco attacked in mid May as "misleading, premature and, in some cases, inaccurate."
The full extent and ecological effects of the oil plumes are not clear yet, but it will certainly have some effect on marine life.
In her separate conference call with reporters, Joye said that on her most recent research mission, a two-week cruise on the vessel F.G. Walton Smith that ended on Sunday, her team found a plume of oil from the leaking well that was about 15 miles long and three miles wide. Its thickness ranged from 600 feet close to the well to 1,600 feet farther out.

Joye said the researchers found unusually high levels of methane in the water. The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig burst into flame on April 20 when a jet of methane exploded up the well's pipe and enveloped the rig.

Joye said the presence of so much oil and methane is depleting oxygen in the water, and that the amount of methane in the water increased after BP engineers severed the well's twisted riser pipe last week to fit a "top hat" containment device over it....

"We have no clue what these dispersants do to phytoplankton, to microorganisms," Joye said. "We know that they are toxic to many larvae. It's impossible I think to know what the impacts are going to be and what the repercussions for various fisheries are going to be."
Meanwhile, BP continues to deny the presence of large underwater oil plumes.

Regarding the ecological consequences, see this interview with a marine scientist who studies pollution in mollusks.

BP plans to donate profits from the oil captured in the containment cap to a wildlife restoration fund. Once royalties and other fees are subtracted, that could amount to $582,470 per day.
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Two More Moths

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Here are two more moths that came to the porch light recently. The first is one of the largest moths I have seen so far this year. This is a Pearly Underwing (Peridroma saucia) from the family Noctuidae. The distinctive patterns on this moth are rather difficult to see without looking closely. Thanks to Seabrooke for help with identification.

One of the things I really like about noctuids is how cute they look from the side.

The second moth is very small, less than 10 mm long. This is a Bidens Borer Moth (Epiblema otiosana). The name refers to a genus of plants that host the moth's larvae. In addition to Bidens, the caterpillars will feed on ragweed or smartweed. I suspect the latter hosted this moth in its larval stage, as there is quite a lot of smartweed around the house.
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Some Recent Moths

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With the return of warmer weather, moths have been more active. Here are a few that I have encountered recently, starting with two that came to the back door. Above is a Thin-lined Owlet (Isogona tenuis), which has a striking pattern even if it appears to be mostly brown. Below is a Speckled Renia Moth (Renia adspergillus).

I have a few more moths from the back door that I may post here once I have them identified. Some, like this plain micromoth, will probably stay unidentified for the time being.

There were a few moths active at Scherman Hoffman Wildlife Preserve on Saturday; I was able to catch up with two. Above is a Common Gray Moth (Anavitrinella pampinaria). I never would have noticed it flush against the side of a tree if it had not flown in front of me. The second appears to be a Metarranthis moth. For now, I am calling it Common Metarranthis (Metarranthis hypochraria), but it could be one of the other species in that genus as all are variable in appearance.


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Green Frog at Scherman Hoffman

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This is one of several Green Frogs that were calling in the small pond at the Scherman Hoffman Wildlife Preserve yesterday morning. The frogs are photogenic and cooperative; as long as they are facing in the right direction, it is easy to photograph them. I watched a fly buzzing around one of the frogs. It even landed on the frog's nose, but the frog did not flinch or try to grab it.

As one would expect, breeding birds were very active defending territories and feeding their young. One surprise was a male Blue-winged Warbler, which was actively foraging but not singing in the first field. I had not heard about them breeding there, but the habitat seems appropriate. Other birds in the field included an Indigo Bunting, House Wrens, and a Ruby-throated Hummingbird. Oddly enough, it was my first hummingbird of the year.

Wood thrushes were singing all along the wooded trails. They were joined by a few singing Scarlet Tanagers and Ovenbirds. A few American Robins were present but unusually silent. A Veery called neared the river. While looping back to the nature center, I saw some Tufted Titmice feeding their chicks.


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Pelicans in BP's Oil Spill

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A cap is on what remains of the riser pipe and appears to be containing some of the leaking oil. Whether it will work in the short term remains to be seen. The Oil Drum has a good explanation of how the cap works, as well as screen shots from BP's live feed. Meanwhile tar balls are starting to wash up on beaches in the Florida panhandle. Onshore winds are expected to move more oil in that direction this weekend.

I cannot quite get my head around the images of the oiled birds that I linked to in yesterday's post. It seems that others feel the same way, and I have seen one argument for a Pulitzer for the AP photographer who shot that set of photos.

The New York Times looks at one of the primary avian victims of the oil spill so far, the Brown Pelican.
In 1968, Louisiana took birds from a surviving Florida colony and reintroduced them along the state’s southern coast in three spots. One was Queen Bess Island, which had been the site of one of the last breeding pairs before extinction, said Kerry St. Pé, program director of the nearby Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program.

Still, the birds struggled, threatened this time by the loss of their habitat. The local wetlands, hurt by levees in the Mississippi that blocked sediment from flowing downstream and by canals cut by oil companies looking to lay pipe, were sinking into the gulf at an astonishing rate. Queen Bess was going under as well until 1990, when a coastal restoration project financed a rock barrier around the island, which stabilized it. The pelican colony began to flourish and the birds’ offspring helped repopulate the coastline, Mr. St. Pé said.

Last year, the birds were officially taken off the endangered species list. But the oil spill, experts said, could change that. Like all birds, pelicans are very sensitive to oil, said Melanie Driscoll, director of bird conservation for the National Audubon Society’s Louisiana Coastal Initiative. It prevents them from regulating their body temperature when it gets on their feathers, she said, and in Louisiana the pelicans are subject to overheating. The oil can also poison the fish the pelicans feed on and seep through the shells of pelican eggs, killing the embryos.
On Thursday alone, a rescue center received 29 oiled pelicans, and more are expected.
The birds at the rehabilitation center, said Sharon Taylor, a veterinarian here, represent a lucky few — far more are certain to die in the wild....

Still, she worried that because there are so many large rookeries nearby, far more pelicans would soon be headed to the center.

“Tomorrow or tonight we could get a hundred pelicans, we could get a thousand pelicans,” Ms. Taylor said.
To provide workers with the information they need, Cornell opened access to the full Birds of North America accounts for the 15 bird species threatened by the spill. As far as I know, anyone can read them, so if you want to read up on any of these species, now is the time to do it.
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Loose Feathers #241

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Brown Pelican being released at Egmont Key NWR after being rescued and cleaned / U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Nick Ameen

Birds and birding news
Birds in the blogosphere
Environment and biodiversity
Carnivals
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Birds of Haiti iPhone App to Benefit Disaster Relief

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There is a new iPhone app for the Birds of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and its sales will benefit continuing disaster relief efforts in Haiti.
100% of the app sales will go immediately to relief efforts in Haiti led by Partners in Health and Habitat for Humanity. The funds will directly support on-the-ground efforts to provide medical care and critical supplies to those affected by the earthquake, as well as to long term strategies to rebuild stronger and more sustainable communities in Haiti.
Partners in Health and Habitat for Humanity were chosen because they have been doing humanitarian work in Haiti for several decades.

The app features 58 birds that are endemic on the island of Hispaniola. Some birds, like Yellow Warbler, will look familiar to North American birders but occur on the island as endemic subspecies. One, Bicknell's Thrush, is not endemic, but the island is its primary winter range. Most are Caribbean specialties, such as the Hispaniolan Crossbill pictured at left. The app reproduces text and illustrations from a recently-published field guide, Birds of the Dominican Republic and Haiti. In addition, there are audio samples for the songs and calls of each species.

 This is not a complete field guide for Haiti and the Dominican Republic since the omits species that the island shares with the rest of the West Indies or that occur as migrants. However, it provides an interesting look at the birds that live there.
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Why You Should Record All Species and Bird Outside Hotspots

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Accurate species distribution data is necessary to address biodiversity challenges. To save endangered species, conservationists need to know which species populations are contracting or expanding. Restoring an ecosystem requires an accurate picture of how the ecosystem existed historically. Unfortunately, existing global data collections such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and IUCN Red List underrepresent some geographic areas, especially in the tropics, and may not show accurate distribution or trends for many species that live there. A further problem with newer datasets is that conservation organizations have focused largely on endangered species and nature reserves and lack the broad baseline data that may be necessary for future conservation problems.

A new study measures how well existing data compilations cover the Galliformes, an order that is well-studied and contains many threatened species. The datasets surveyed included museum collections, scientific articles, banding records, bird atlases, and birders' trip reports (archived on sites such as travellingbirder.com). Museum collections are the most significant source of historical distribution data, and scientific literature has gained importance over time. Birding reports are a relatively new phenomenon and still account for relatively few records, with most of those coming from birding hotspots.

Geographic coverage of different data sources: A) museums, B) literature, C) banding, D) atlases, and E) website trip reports

The data sources vary in how much geographic area they cover. Museum collections are the most comprehensive as a whole, though individual collections may be more localized. Scientific literature covers western Europe, China, and southern Asia well, but not as many studies are available for other regions. Banding data and atlases were largely confined to western Europe. Birding trip reports provide broader coverage than banding or atlases but are concentrated in well-known hotspots and easily accessible locations. Because active specimen collecting has declined, contemporary data sources are less geographically comprehensive than older ones (see maps below).

Records for all galliform species across the Indian Subcontinent from A) pre-1930 and B) 1990–2006

The authors offer three suggestions for improving the geographic coverage and usability of biodiversity data:
  1. Museum collections and sightings data from scientific literature should be catalogued in electronic databases to make historical data more accessible.*
  2. Observation records should include a date and location, preferably with geographic coordinates, and be incorporated into a central database to avoid fragmentation.
  3. Observers should report all species rather than just rare or threatened ones and should look outside of known biodiversity hotspots.
They see a role for citizen science projects to monitor biodiversity and cite eBird specifically as an example of how a citizen science project should collect data from users. From their perspective, its principal strengths include requiring users to enter a date and geotagged location, flagging unusual records for review by regional editors, and encouraging participants to submit checklists from areas with few observations. Unfortunately eBird has so far been limited to the Americas (though it will expand coverage soon) and only records bird observations. The authors hope, however, that eBird's model can be expanded to other taxa, even less charismatic ones.

* Though the authors do not cite it specifically, the North American Bird Phenology Program still needs volunteers to scan and transcribe thousands of historical observations.

ResearchBlogging.orgBoakes, E., McGowan, P., Fuller, R., Chang-qing, D., Clark, N., O'Connor, K., & Mace, G. (2010). Distorted Views of Biodiversity: Spatial and Temporal Bias in Species Occurrence Data PLoS Biology, 8 (6) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1000385
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Red Knot Population Holding Steady But Not Growing Yet

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In the last two decades, the Red Knot population has steadily decreased. The primary cause seems to be overharvesting of horseshoe crabs, used in medical research and as bait for catching other shellfish. Red Knots and other shorebirds migrating along the Atlantic coast rely on horseshoe crab eggs for food, to the extent that these shorebirds time their arrival to coincide with the peak of horseshoe crab spawning. Recent regulations have tried to stabilize the situation, from a complete moratorium on horseshoe crab harvests in New Jersey to harvest limits in other states.

According to this year's shorebird census, the numbers of horseshoe crabs and Red Knots have not improved yet.
Each year, scientists from as far away as Australia and England take over two rental houses on Reed’s Beach and study Red Knot/Horseshoe crab numbers at the peak of the phenomenon, a full moon in late May or early June. The crabs come out of the bay in the highest numbers under the full moon.

“The crab spawning is happening at the right time in relation to the bird stopover,” said Humphrey Sitters, a scientist from the University of Exeter in England with the International Wader Study Group....

In 2009 and this year, the birds and crabs have arrived at the same time. He said there is some evidence this year at least part of the Red Knot population was delayed in early May in Patagonia, the southernmost portion of South America in Argentina.

Horseshoe Crab numbers reached a peak in 2006-2007 and have since declined, according to Virginia Tech data. Overharvesting by commercial fishermen who cut up the crabs for bait to catch conch and eels has reduced the crab population greatly since 1990.

“If anything, the adult crabs have declined over the last three years (2006-2009) but on the other hand, there seems to be an increase in immature crabs,” said Sitter.

The scientists conduct counts of the number of Red Knots along the bay. Last year, the count increased to about 25,000 birds. He said this year he believed the peak count would be around 17,000 Red Knots.

The population has dropped from a count of 50,000 birds in 1998.
I would not expect the harvest limits to produce a rebound right away since horseshoe crabs take several years to reach maturity and the horseshoe crab population needs to stabilize before the Red Knot population can grow significantly. With that in mind, the increase in immature crabs is encouraging. It is also encouraging that the Red Knots arrived at the same time as the horseshoe crab spawn this year, as that should allow them to gain the weight they need to make it to the Arctic and breed.

According to another article, some of the banders are using geolocators to track where the shorebirds go.
Burger helped to band shorebirds this week with geo-locaters that measure the sun's rays. Red knots nest in pairs far from others of their kind, making them notoriously difficult to find in their arctic breeding grounds. But scientists who capture tagged knots can use the tag's information about sunrise and sunset to pinpoint exactly where they went. So far the scientists have recaptured four red knots they banded with geo-locaters in past seasons.
There are photos from one banding session at the CMBO's blog.

In a related story, a truck full of lobsters and horseshoe crabs overturned on the Parkway at mile 0.7. I assume that the horseshoe crabs were harvested in another state.
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Birds Spread Heavy Metals to Arctic Ponds

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A recent study found that coastal seafood-eating birds can carry toxins inland.
The team collected sediment cores from two ponds on a small island in the Canadian Arctic that is home to the nests of two kinds of seabirds: Arctic terns, which feed primarily on fish, and common eider ducks which feed mainly on mollusks. The researchers analyzed the pond sediment for metals and other indicators of the birds' activity.

They found significant differences between the samples that aligned with the birds' diets. There were higher concentrations of metals such as mercury and cadmium in the sites inhabited by terns, while the nearby eider site recorded higher amounts of lead, manganese, and aluminum. The patterns of metals in the sediment cores matched those recorded in the different bird species' tissues....

"The seabirds are obviously not directly to blame for the elevated metal concentrations in the ponds," says team member Jules Blais, a biology professor from the University of Ottawa. "They are simply carrying out their natural behaviours and lifecycles, but have become unwitting vectors of pollutants in an increasingly industrial age."
An earlier study found a similar pattern in Northern Fulmars, so this result is not at all surprising.
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Top Kill Fails; What's Next?

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NASA image acquired May 24, 2010

Yesterday, I was unsure whether the "top kill" was making progress. As it turns out, the "top kill" failed because of the extreme pressure at the bottom of the Gulf. The remaining options are not very reassuring.
In its next effort to halt what its officials have called an "environmental catastrophe," BP will cut off the leaking riser at the top of the five-story blowout preventer atop the wellhead to get an even surface on the broken pipe.

Then the company will install what's called a lower marine riser package, a cap containment system that would be connected to a new riser from the drillship Discoverer Enterprise 5,000 feet above on the surface. The aim is to minimize the amount of oil reaching the shore until BP can drill relief wells, Suttles said.

He estimated that the procedure would take about four days to complete, but if it also fails, it could be several months before BP can finish drilling two relief wells to intersect the runaway well so concrete can be poured into it.

As much as 73 million more gallons of oil could contaminate the Gulf of Mexico if the flow continues unabated until August — the soonest that officials estimate the relief wells can be drilled — poisoning wildlife, destroying fragile marshlands, closing more fishing grounds and depriving fisherman, resort workers and many others of their livelihoods.
 In the process of attempting the "top kill," BP pumped over 30,000 gallons of drilling mud into the wellhead, but most of that escaped through the riser. Adding junk like golf balls to the mix did not solve the problem. The idea of this spill continuing throughout the storm is particularly disturbing in light of the coming hurricane season, due to begin on Tuesday. This year is predicted to be more active than average, and any storms that pass through the Gulf could push the oil towards land. How severely this would affect the coastline remains to be seen, but it would be much better if we did not have to find out.

Missteps by BP prior to the drilling rig's explosion likely contributed to the spill.
BP, for instance, cut short a procedure involving drilling fluid that is designed to detect gas in the well and remove it before it becomes a problem, according to documents belonging to BP and to the drilling rig's owner and operator, Transocean Ltd.

BP also skipped a quality test of the cement around the pipe—another buffer against gas—despite what BP now says were signs of problems with the cement job and despite a warning from cement contractor Halliburton Co.

Once gas was rising, the design and procedures BP had chosen for the well likely gave this perilous gas an easier path up and out, say well-control experts. There was little keeping the gas from rushing up to the surface after workers, pushing to finish the job, removed a critical safeguard, the heavy drilling fluid known as "mud." BP has admitted a possible "fundamental mistake" in concluding that it was safe to proceed with mud removal, according to a memo from two Congressmen released Tuesday night.

Finally, a BP manager overseeing final well tests apparently had scant experience in deep-water drilling. He told investigators he was on the rig to "learn about deep water," according to notes of an interview with him seen by the Journal.
At least one of their choices was apt in hindsight:
BP was drilling to tap an oil reservoir it had identified called Macondo, the same name as the cursed town in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude."
Meanwhile, it is worth remembering that terrible oil spills are chronic problems elsewhere on the planet.
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Killing an Oil Spill

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Handlers cleaning an oiled Brown Pelican / Tami A. Heilemann-DOI 

Yesterday BP continued its effort to plug the leaking oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. News reports about the procedure's outcome were contradictory, with some indicating that oil had stopped leaking, while others reported that the effort was unsuccessful. It seems that some of the confusion derives for BP's news releases.
Despite an apparent lack of progress, officials said they would continue with the process for another 48 hours, into Sunday, before giving up and considering other options, including another containment dome to try to capture the oil....

Nor were there perfect answers Friday about the status of the top kill effort. For the second day, public statements early in the day from BP and government officials seemed to suggest progress. Later in the day, they acknowledged that the effort was no closer to succeeding than when they started....

The technician said that engineers had come up with a variety of theories about why efforts have failed so far, and they were trying different sizes of objects. He said the process required trial and error — and sifting through various theories among engineers in the operation’s control room — about the best way to clog the “internal geometry” of the damaged equipment.

BP said pumping operations resumed around 3:45 p.m. Friday.

The technician said that despite all the injections, at various pressure levels, engineers had been able to keep less than 10 percent of the injection fluids inside the stack of pipes above the well. He said that was barely an improvement on the results Wednesday, when the operation began and was suspended after about 10 hours.
There should be some more definite news on this operation in the next day or two. I am still holding out hope that it will work. Until something does work, the spilling oil continues to threaten underwater ecosystems.
At risk are such endangered species as Kemp's ridley sea turtles and the Atlantic bluefin tuna, as well as the Gulf of Mexico's 8,300 other creatures from plankton to birds. The contamination, some say, is likely to undo years of work that brought some wildlife, such as the brown pelican, back from the brink of extinction.

"It's probably going to be one of the worst disasters we've ever seen," said Paul Montagna, a professor of ecology at the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi.

"Instead of creating a typical spill, where the oil goes to the surface and you can scoop it up, this stuff has been distributed throughout the water column, and that means everything, absolutely everything, is being affected," he said.

Further complicating the toxic effects of the oil, the chemical dispersants — used as never before a mile below the surface — have changed the crude in ways that will keep it from breaking down.
The presence of such large amounts of crude oil suspended below the surface in the water column is one of the more disturbing aspects of the current spill. It has as much potential to damage ecosystems underwater as on the surface or on land, but underwater it is out of sight and more difficult to clean up.
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Loose Feathers #240

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Least Tern / Photo by Steve Maslowski (USFWS)

Birds and birding news
Birds in the blogosphere
Environment and biodiversity
Carnivals
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Cape May Notes

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Last week I was in Cape May for a few days to see the late stages of spring migration and to track down some potential life birds. Even without potential lifers as bait, mid-May is a great time to visit Cape May because of the abundance of northbound migrants and vocal breeding birds. As usual I traveled with my mother and sister, both of whom are also birders.

For several days, Brigantine hosted a Bar-tailed Godwit and a Scissor-tailed Flycatcher had been reported, both of which would have been life birds for me. However, neither were visible from the wildlife drive on the day I was there. So I had to make do with looking at thousands of other shorebirds, and herons, and the handful of breeding Osprey pairs, and the breeding Peregrine pair, and the occasional moth. A few Bank Swallows joined the more common Barn Swallows and Tree Swallows at the Gull Pond.

A Scissor-tailed Flycatcher had also been reported in the South Cape May Meadows, but it was not present there on Thursday night. By the next morning, it had relocated to the second plover pond in Cape May Point State Park. We watched it there as it swooped for insects in all its glory. In addition to the flycatcher, the state park produced a nice crop of warblers, including a Canada Warbler and many Blackpolls.

In the evening we visited Turkey Point in Cumberland County to listen for night birds. When we arrived, Clapper Rails and Virginia Rails were already vocalizing. They were joined by a chorus of Marsh Wrens and Seaside Sparrows. Night Herons were already active; most were Black-crowned, but a Yellow-crowned flew past as well. As the sun set, a Great Horned Owl started hooting somewhere in the distance. Shortly after that, we could hear a Whippoorwill repeating its three-note song. The Whippoorwill was my second life bird of the trip. Even better than the life bird, however, was the experience of standing and listening in a place that is about as dark and quiet as one can find in New Jersey.

A birding by boat trip on The Osprey produced many more shorebirds. (This is a great tour if you are in Cape May during the summer months.) We saw at least a thousand Dunlin, and many Whimbrels, Willets, Ruddy Turnstones, Short-billed Dowitchers, and other species. The tour runs past a heron rookery, which featured a lone Cattle Egret in addition to the expected Snowy and Great Egrets. The boat's captain also spotted an otter near one of the fishing docks. I only got a brief glimpse of its head before the otter disappeared. Terrapins were active near one of the islands.


Reed's Beach, as one might expect, was packed with shorebirds, gulls, and birdwatchers. Red Knots were the prime attractions. I estimated a flock of 500 when we were present, but there may have been more. Several waves of a hundred or more knots and Ruddy Turnstones flew over our heads as we watched the birds from the jetty. An evening visit to Stipson Island Road in western Cape May County produced more of the rails and songbirds we had heard at Turkey Point the night before. As we were leaving, my sister spotted a White-faced Ibis among a small group of Glossy Ibises. This was my third life bird of the trip. Jakes Landing had the same set of birds we had observed at Turkey Point, but without the owl or nightjars.
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Oak Leaftier Moth

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This appears to be an Oak Leaftier Moth (Acleris semipurpurana). The species can vary greatly in appearance from one individual to the next. Some are yellow with a large brown blotch in the middle of the dorsal surface, while others are mostly yellow. There is one very similar species, Blueberry Leaftier (Acleris curvalana). According to the account on BugGuide, the best way to distinguish the two in the field is proximity to potential host plants. This moth was resting directly underneath a Pin Oak, with no blueberry plants nearby.
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Leafroller Moth

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I found and photographed this moth at E.B. Forsythe NWR (a.k.a. Brigantine) last week. I think it is most likely a Broken-banded Leafroller (Choristoneura fractivittana). A few days after I took my photos, I happened to see a very similar moth photographed by one of my Flickr contacts. That led me to this identification.

This moth's larval foodplants include apple, beech, birch, elm, oak, and raspberry. Many leafrollers can become agricultural pests. The Choristoneura genus includes spruce budworms, which are known to defoliate large tracts of forest during major outbreaks. Despite being a headache for the timber industry and land managers, budworms can be good for birds. Eastern Spruce Budworm (Choristoneura fumiferana) is an important food source during the breeding season for several species of warbler, including Tennessee, Cape May, and Bay-breasted.

I have posted some additional views of this individual at Flickr.
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Bush Katydid

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This nymphal insect was on a Deutzia shrub in the garden. At first I thought it was one of the assassin bugs, but according to a response to my photo on BugGuide, it actually a Scudder's Bush Katydid (Scudderia sp.). Members of the Scudderia genus are apparently not identifiable to species in their nymphal stage.
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The Secret Life of Puffins

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Hawks have their nestcams, and now puffins do too. Two webcams are monitoring the progress of an Atlantic Puffin nest in the U.K., and the live feed is being streamed online.
Two cameras have been put around a puffin burrow at Sumburgh Head on Shetland, and images are being beamed to the nation via the RSPB website.

The puffincam is part of the wildlife charity’s ‘Date With Nature’ at Sumburgh Head, one of many UK-wide projects aimed at giving people up close and personal experiences with nature.

Newton Harper, Date with Nature Assistant, says: “We hope that by seeing these incredible images, people will feel even more passionate about Shetland’s seabirds, especially puffins, or ‘Tammy Nories’ as they are known in the islands.

“Sumburgh Head is one of the most accessible places in Shetland to see puffins and now with our puffincam people can also watch them from the comfort of their own home.

“Puffins are perhaps the nation’s favourite seabirds and I have heard that people are watching the camera from dawn to dusk.”
You can find the live feed on the RSPB website.
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Oil Spill: New Calculations on the Way

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As I have mentioned before on this blog, there has been some controversy regarding just how much oil is spilling out of the Deepwater Horizon's broken riser pipe. Independent experts have estimated a much greater leak than BP has. Now the US government has convened an independent panel to settle the question.
The task force is being chaired by David Moore, a petroleum engineer who is coordinator of the national outer continental shelf oil spill program at the Minerals Management Service, and Catherine Cesnik, who leads the sustainable building policy for the Department of the Interior.

Among its members are Steve Wereley, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., who told Congress that, based on recent videos, he estimated that 95,000 barrels of oil per day were pouring from two different leaks.

In addition to Wereley, the panel will include other university researchers and representatives of the Coast Guard, the Minerals Management Service, the Department of Energy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the U.S. Geological Survey.
One notable party that will not be on the panel is BP since the Obama administration seems worried about the estimate's credibility. The panel will try to take independent measurements:
Mike Lutz, a Coast Guard spokesman, said the team would study videos of the oil gushing from the leaks, as well as information about pressure and the ruined equipment on the sea floor. He said he didn’t have information about whether they’d use other equipment, such as sonar, to measure the flow.

Adm. Thad Allen, the commandant of the Coast Guard and the Obama's point man on the cleanup, said in an interview earlier in the week that government scientists might put sensors near the leak to get a better understanding of the amount of oil entering the water.
Having an accurate estimate of the size of the spill is important for deciding where and how much cleanup resources are needed. It may also have some bearing on compensation for losses as a result of the spill.

Meanwhile, the effect on wildlife is difficult to measure.
Repeatedly the officials said they were very concerned about gulf wildlife; that they could not predict how birds and fish and the like would be affected; and that they had no idea when they would know.

Yet the scientists at the news conference did seem to suggest that while the visible harm done is not too bad so far, we should not stop paying attention:

“The extent of the impacts are not known, but they are certainly significant,” said Ralph Morgenweck of the Fish and Wildlife Service, a senior science adviser and liaison officer at the Unified Area Command. “And we know they are certainly going to get worse.”

“No one should believe that because we have not recovered thousands of oiled wildlife,” the results are not very serious, he said.
Rescuers continue to find more oiled birds, only some of which they can rescue.

See also Nate's rant on the pathetic spectacle of the Interior Department's performance before and during the spill.
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Loose Feathers #239

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Scissor-tailed Flycatcher / Photo by Gary Kramer (USFWS)

Birds and birding news
Birds in the blogosphere
Environment and biodiversity
Blog carnivals
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Oil Spill: Possibly 95,000 Barrels Per Day

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According to congressional testimony, the Deepwater Horizon spill may be 19 times larger than official estimates:
Steve Wereley, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., earlier this month made simple calculations from a single video BP released on May 12 and calculated a flow of 70,000 barrels a day, NPR reported last week.

On Wednesday, Wereley told a House of Representatives Energy and Commerce subcommittee that his calculations of two leaks that are on videos BP released on Tuesday showed 70,000 barrels from one leak and 25,000 from the other.

He said the margin of error was about 20 percent, making the spill between 76,000 and 104,000 barrels a day. However, Wereley said he'd need to see videos that showed the flow over a longer period to get a better calculation of the mix of oil and gas from the wellhead.
The Coast Guard plans to put a sensor near the source of the leak to get a better sense of how much is leaking.

The tar balls found in Florida earlier this week did not come from the Deepwater Horizon spill.
Lab results released Wednesday, after the U.S. Coast Guard used a Falcon jet to whisk the samples from Miami to a lab in Groton, Conn., revealed the 50 or so three- to eight-inch tar balls did not come from the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

The Coast Guard lab's findings were conclusive, a statement said, even as the source of the spill that spawned the tar balls was still not known.
Meanwhile, the Minerals Management Service will be split into three parts to avoid having the regulatory and revenue-collecting functions housed in the same agency.
The reorganization, which has a 30-day timetable, will create the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to develop energy resources, including offshore renewable resources, and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, which will police offshore operations and protect the environment.

Most importantly, Salazar said, the existing division of the agency that oversees $13 billion in annual revenue collection will evolve into the Office of Natural Resources Revenue, move to the Interior Department's budget and management division, and be entirely separate from Interior's land and minerals division.

About 700 of the agency's 1,700 employees will move to the revenue collection division. Another 300 will be devoted to environmental safety and enforcement, and the remaining 700 will work on offshore energy leasing plans.
Hopefully this move will lead to more effective health and environmental regulation of drilling operations.
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Exploring the Passaic

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The Passaic River in Lord Stirling Park, near Basking Ridge, NJ

Yesterday's Grist featured the first installment of a two-part essay on the Passaic, New Jersey's longest river, written by someone who grew up on the river's banks. Here is a taste:
The Passaic is many rivers: swift and clear in its upper stretch, sluggish and swampy in mid-section, a thundering cascade at Great Falls, brackish below the Dundee Dam, and so industrial in its final miles that New Jersey poet laureate William Carlos Williams declared it "the vilest swill hole."

The river rises in Mendham, an historic township in north central Jersey. It heads almost due south at first, then veers sharply north, then northeast, then due east and then south again, making two final northward loops before emptying into Newark Bay. This erratic path traces a sloppy, upside-down U that winds through, over, under, and around seven New Jersey counties, 45 of its cities and towns, three swamps, three dams, four meadows, four waterfalls, a pond, a lake, 49 bridges and seven highways, and past countless homes, parks, playing fields, parking lots, diners, junkyards, office buildings, shopping centers, gas stations, warehouses, and factories. The drive from Mendham to Newark is about 30 miles. The Passaic takes the long way around.

The Passaic's 90-mile journey can be divided into three long stretches. The Upper Passaic is a largely downhill romp through meadows and forest and along the southeastern edge of the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge. The Central Basin is the long, flat, flood-prone mid-section that flows north through an ancient lakebed. The Lower Valley, where I grew up, is a 35-mile-long corridor with sides that curl like plumped pillows as it sweeps down from the cliffs of Paterson to the sea level marshes of Newark.

In its convoluted journey from pristine headwaters to the superfund site at its mouth, the Passaic mirrors the triumphant and tragic relationship between nature and industry in America. The wildness and beauty that awed the first settlers some 400 years ago turned America into an industrial titan. Rivers like the Passaic powered the mills, farms, and factories that produced clothes, food, steel and electricity, a robust international trade, and a large and solid middle class. But along the way, the mighty frontier that helped forge American enterprise and character fell victim to an industrial fervor that seemed, at every turn, to sacrifice natural resources for financial gain.
Read the rest.
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Oil Spill: Worse Than Government or BP Can Handle

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Tanker recovering oil from the leaking riser pipe / U.S. Coast Guard photo

Yesterday one of my questions about BP's siphon was answered: the siphon and tanker are capturing about 2,000 barrels of oil per day from the leaking Deepwater Horizon wellhead. However, since the size of the leak is disputed, we do not know for certain how much is still leaking. Even with the siphon, the remaining leak is taxing the abilities of the government to control the growing oil slick.
The Coast Guard commandant, Adm. Thad Allen, said that despite the siphoning, the spilled oil is spreading and now stretches from western Louisiana to Florida's Key West. The extent of the spill was straining even the substantial resources deployed for one of the worst ecological disasters in recent history, he said.

Allen said the approximately 20,000 people now working to prevent the spill from reaching land were struggling to deal with an environmental threat that he called "omni-directional and almost indeterminate" in size. He said federal disaster plans had been formulated to deal with far more localized spills.

"We're dealing with something that's more complicated than any spill I've ever dealt with," Allen told the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. "The national system did not contemplate that we would have to do all of this at once."

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration widened its no-fishing zone to cover 19 percent of the Gulf, or 45,728 square miles, and its head, Jane Lubchenco, told a news conference that "a light tendril of oil" is spreading eastward and approaching the loop current, a powerful warm-water current that could drag the oil around Florida and into the Gulf Stream that flows up the Atlantic coast.
There are still unanswered questions (at least in public) about the spill and its effects.
BP, the company in charge of the rig that exploded last month in the Gulf of Mexico, hasn't publicly divulged the results of tests on the extent of workers' exposure to evaporating oil or from the burning of crude over the gulf, even though researchers say that data is crucial in determining whether the conditions are safe.

Moreover, the company isn't monitoring the extent of the spill and only reluctantly released videos of the spill site that could give scientists a clue to the amount of the oil in gulf....

The company also hasn't publicly released air sampling for oil spill workers although Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the agency in charge of monitoring compliance with worker safety regulations, is relying on the information and has urged it to do so.

"It is not ours to publish," said Dean Wingo, OSHA's assistant regional administrator who oversees Louisiana. "We are working with (BP) and encouraging them to post the data so that it is publicly available." ...

Unlike the response to other past national disasters such as Hurricane Katrina where the government was in charge, BP has been designated as the "responsible party" under federal law and is overseeing much of the response to the spill. The government is acting more as an adviser.

So far, the government has been slow to press BP to release its data and permit others to evaluate the extent of the crisis.
Meanwhile, 156 sea turtles have now washed up dead on beaches around the Gulf of Mexico. A link to the oil spill is still unproven, since the turtles show no signs of oil, but the event is remarkably unusual.

Finally here is a list of the oiled birds treated by the International Bird Rescue Research Center.
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