Photo: Frankling Abbott
After the spill, residents and visitors across the Gulf were enraged, upset, even hopeless. Quickly however, they united across states and coastal communities through their desire to help.
More than 12,000 volunteers joined the effort within a single week in May. The Audubon Volunteer Response Center was established in June 2010 in Moss Point. Over the course of five months, Audubon engaged more than 37,000 volunteers nationally.
Building on already existing coastal monitoring programs in Florida, Audubon recruited and trained 68 volunteers across four states to survey more than 60,000 birds on the coast for six straight months in 2010, and to watch for more oiled populations.
Thanks to this work, Audubon volunteers found 982 oiled birds across 33 species. The rescue effort was driven by Erik Johnson, then a graduate student at Louisiana State University (now Director of Bird Conservation at Audubon Louisiana), and has grown into the Audubon Coastal Bird Survey. Ten years later, the survey continues to record seasonal data on bird populations.
After rehabilitation, researchers gave oiled birds permanent jewelry to help them learn about the animals’ recovery in the form of uniquely numbered leg bands.
In the aftermath of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, oiled Brown Pelicans became one of the tragedy’s most iconic victims. As one of Florida’s largest seabirds, Brown Pelicans flock together to breed in colonies. Flying low over the waves, they look for baitfish schooling at the water’s surface, then rise into the air before spiraling back down in an aerial dive as majestic as it is powerful. A slight tilt to their heads prevents injury as they hit the water with a splash, scooping up fish in their large, expandable pouched bills.
Across the Gulf Coast, Brown Pelicans are now a common sight — but they were once quite rare.
Nearly Gone - Brown Pelican's Brush with Extinction
For decades, plume-hunting, overfishing, and pesticide use decimated their numbers, and pelican populations hit all-time lows in the mid-20th century. When Louisiana named the Brown Pelican its state bird in 1966, all breeding pelicans had already disappeared from the state. In order to bring pelicans back, Louisiana transported fledglings from Florida in a repopulation effort.
However, only after naming the pelican to the Endangered Species list in 1970, followed by the banning of one of the worst pesticides — DDT — in 1972, did the large seabird begin to recover.
Since the 1970s, the Brown Pelican has symbolized what effective environmental regulation and conservation management can do for a resilient species.
Once gone from Louisiana’s shores and declining across its range, the Brown Pelican’s population had exploded to such a degree that they were deemed “recovered” in 1996, removed from the Endangered Species list in 2009, and are now synonymous with coastal communities and tourist destinations across the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Coast. Millions of Americans have memories of shading their eyes just in time to see a flock of pelicans gliding over a beach, or watching in awe as they plunge-dive into the waves for a fishy meal.
Survival After the Spill
An estimated 27,000 Brown Pelicans died as a result of the oil spill, and many others that were heavily oiled became a symbol of the harm the disaster wrought upon the avian world. Pelicans are especially vulnerable to long-running disasters because it takes them 3-5 years to reach full maturity, and they typically only produce one fledgling per year. A gap in fledging chicks can cause significant population declines. Moreover, Brown Pelicans’ effective reproductive lifespan is only 4-7 years.
In all, researchers estimate that the United States lost 10% of its Brown Pelican population as result of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
In the immediate days and weeks after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, rehabbers, veterinarians, and volunteers descended on the Gulf of Mexico coastline to de-oil the birds before they perished.
Because so much oil remained in the Gulf for months after the spill, ornithologists worried that pelicans released in the same area would be oiled once more. To give them the best chance at survival, many were moved to neighboring states, including Florida.
“Banding oiled birds that were cleaned and released provides crucial information on long-term survival of birds exposed to crude oil,” says Marianne Korosy, Ph.D., Director of Bird Conservation for Audubon Florida. “If/when there is a ‘next time’ we will know much more about the degree of harm to be expected for bird populations.”
Spotting Wings of Hope 10 Years Later
One of the birds oiled during the disaster, an immature Brown Pelican, was admitted to the Fort Jackson Wildlife Center at Buras, Louisiana, for rehabilitation on June 11, 2010. Dr. Erica Miller assigned it a leg band numbered “78Z.”
Once it was ready for release, 78Z, along with 30 other birds rehabilitated at the Center, was flown from New Orleans to the St. Petersburg/Clearwater Coast Guard Station on July 7 and released at Fort De Soto Park.
Fast forward to February 5, 2018.
Hundreds of miles from New Orleans, Audrey Albrecht, shorebird biologist with Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation, was conducting her annual winter shorebird survey. Noticing some activity in the canopy of a nearby pine tree, Albrecht peered through her scope and, saw that it was a Brown Pelican, and was about to move on when she noticed a shiny metal band on the bird’s leg. As she typically does, Albrecht took photos of the bird, making note of the band number, 78Z, for later reconnaissance.
After doing some research, she was able to make contact with the bird’s bander, Dr. Miller, who was ecstatic to learn about the bird’s whereabouts. This was the first sighting of the bird she had received since it was released nearly eight years earlier. Albrecht was equally ecstatic then, as she has been every time she has re-spotted the bird in her area; she saw it again on January 13, 2020, and again, during her winter survey, on February 7.
Thanks to banding programs, researchers have a much better idea of the survivability of birds that they have rehabilitated. It seems 78Z has found a new winter home.
Rehabilitated Pelicans Spotted at Alafia Banks
After the disaster, two additional pelicans released in Florida were re-sighted at Audubon’s Alafia Bank Bird Sanctuary near Tampa. Set free in Fort De Soto Park in St. Petersburg, about a dozen miles from the Sanctuary, the pair revealed their identities as Deepwater Horizon survivors through the multicolored bands on their legs.
Alafia Bank Bird Sanctuary, which includes Bird Island to the east and Sunken Island to the west, is located in Hillsborough Bay at the mouth of the Alafia River and is leased from The Mosaic Company who collaborates with Audubon Florida for managing the site.
These two manmade islands were formed from spoil material when a channel was constructed in the 1920s to connect an industrial facility at the mouth of the Alafia River with the main Tampa Bay shipping channel. Gulls, terns, and Black Skimmers immediately flocked to the islands to use the space as nesting grounds. As shrubs and trees replaced low-lying vegetation, nesting herons, egrets, ibis, and later pelicans moved from the historic nesting site at nearby Green Key.
In 2019, Audubon staff and volunteers monitored 10,000 pairs of 15 species nesting on the Alafia Bank Bird Sanctuary, making it one of the largest colonies in Florida and one of the most diverse colonies in the continental United States. Today, the sanctuary also hosts one of the largest Brown Pelican breeding colonies in the Tampa Bay region. In fact, the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission has listed Alafia Bank as the most important colony in the state, due to its size (number of birds nesting), longevity of nesting activity, and species diversity. It has earned Critical Wildlife Area (CWA) designation.
Biologists believe that the two rehabilitated pelicans not only feed at Alafia Bank, but are also using the sanctuary to breed — repopulating after the oil spill wiped out so many other birds in nearby states. These two survivors serve as a poignant reminder of just how important Audubon Florida’s work is to the region, state, and entire Gulf of Mexico.
To continue bolstering the Brown Pelican population, Audubon Florida is investing in resilient coastlines and living shorelines to safeguard this iconic species.
“The Gulf of Mexico is one ecosystem,” says Marianne Korosy, Ph.D., Director of Bird Conservation.
“Birds can spend some or all of their lives moving across the Gulf coastlines searching for food, nesting habitat, and mates. Though most of the oiled birds appeared on Louisiana’s shores, the hundreds of thousands of birds lost directly to oil or subsequent food shortages impact populations from Florida to Texas and beyond. An oil spill along the shores of Louisiana may affect birds thousands of miles away.”
Photo: John Herrick
Living Shorelines
A living shoreline uses rock, oyster shell, concrete substrate, or other hard material to blunt wave energy reaching the coast. The calmer waters between the barrier and the shore create new habitat, and shoreline begins to accrete. Oysters and barnacles growing on the living shoreline barriers create new and important reef systems.
Mark Rachal steps into the 20-foot center console ski, throwing rope lines back into the boat and motoring towards the Alafia Bank Bird Sanctuary.
As he moves away from the boat launch, Brown Pelicans, Forster’s Terns, and Great Egrets wheel across the blue sky overhead, a testament to the importance of the bird habitat here, not only during nesting season, but year round.
As Sanctuary Manager at Alafia, Rachal is charged with inspecting nearly 5,000 feet of newly installed living shoreline breakwater arrays along the north shores of both Sunken and Bird Islands, the two islands of the Alafia Bank Bird Sanctuary that comprise a state CWA.
Over the years, erosion from ship wakes and storm events threatened these nesting sites. Audubon has been working to devise a more resilient future by protecting crucial nesting islands from sea level rise as well as battering storm surges and ship wakes.
In 2011, Audubon began construction of a new living shoreline breakwater near the edge of Sunken Island. The concrete wave attenuation devices — known as WADs — that make up the breakwater intercept incoming wave energy before it hits the shoreline, slowing or even stopping erosion altogether. The calm water between the island and the breakwater provides foraging and nesting habitat. Phases 1 and 2 — encompassing 1,000 linear feet near the shore of Sunken Island — were completed in 2014.
Hurricanes have demonstrated the eectiveness of these measures; trees behind the structures survived the storm surge while those along adjacent, unprotected shorelines did not. Rachal cruises past the long-finished segments of the living shoreline to the just-completed segment along the north shore of the two islands. In 2019, Rachal and his team worked withLiving Shorelines Solutions and Cypress Gulf Development to install an additional 5,000 feet — nearly a mile! — of additional living shoreline along both Bird and Sunken Islands, bringing the total area of protected coastline to over 6,000 linear feet. Set in 500-foot sections separated by 12-foot gaps for marine animal access, the breakwater allows water to flow through to the shallow, quiet water lagoon.
Now complete, the living shoreline protects the Brown Pelicans and 14 other species, providing additional nesting habitat not only for the birds translocated after the Deepwater Horizon spill, but also for future generations born here.