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Pollution causing problems to Auks along the south coast. (1 Viewer)

Wendy Morris

Wendy Morris

Well-known member
Some of you may have heard about the sea birds, mainly guillemots and other auks, that have been found with an oily/waxy substance on their feathers. Several score have been rescued and taken to a specialist RSPB rescue site near Taunton. They have been found from Dorset as far away as Cornwall and it's thought many hundreds may die or already be dead. I was on Chesil Beach this afternoon, before I knew about this situation, and saw two birds, right on the shoreline that were obviously not happy. I'm not sure that I could have done anything to help, even if I'd been aware of what was happening, but I feel very sad that those two are probably no longer alive.

You can just see the greeny/yellow colouring of the substance in this picture. It only became clear when I cropped it, after finding out what was going on.

There's a link to the story here.
 

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I heard about this on the news and was shocked, but I did hear there trying to save as many as they can.

Does anyone know how that much oily substance got there? Will effect fish stocks massivly Aswell.
 
They said on the news, it was Chris Packham being interviewed, that only a small percentage of treated & released sea birds actually survive, but saving any is a good thing.
 
How very sad! Hope it doesn't turn as bad as out Gulf BP disaster.

Do you have sea turtles and crabs in the area too? What a horrorible way to die.
 
Chickadeedeedee said:
How very sad! Hope it doesn't turn as bad as out Gulf BP disaster.

Do you have sea turtles and crabs in the area too? What a horrorible way to die.
Click to expand...

There will be thousands of crabs in that area Aswell as lobster's. So some may die. :(. I dont think the UK has any kind of sea turtle, I think the odd one or two pop up rarely but there not common..tho I may be mistaken.
 
I don't think we get turtles in our seas, not this time of year anyway, but we do have lots of other marine creatures, including crabs, lobsters, sea horses & corals etc. Which would be vulnerable to any oil also.
 
During the Gulf of Mexico disaster ... there was a fiddler crab struggling to walk on the oil soaked beach. How do you clean a crab from oil? :*(
 
Same way they clean the sea birds, I guess, Fairy liquid diluted with water & a sponge, preferably with it's claws taped up so it can't get you.:gh:
 
It seems that this mineral oil that's coating these birds needs something like margarine and washing up liquid to clean up.

Yes, Lyme Bay is an important coastal fishing area for various shellfish including scallops and crabs. Could well be a further problem with them.

There's an update here on our local news.
 
The news this morning says with the change in the wind, a lot of birds will now be blown out to sea and not to land and so may never be found. I don't know what the penalties are for this kind of thing but to my mind they never seem strong enough to act as a deterrent.

George
 
Awful sight, horrible to see all those birds affected. I'd like to know if the people responsible will be made to pay for the clean-up if they're caught? :C

Could not ships be made to apply some kind of tracer to their liquid cargos, which would identify which ship any spillages came from? Would probably be difficult to get passed into law and enacted but surely making owners more easily identifiable and culpable for cleaning up spills from their ships would have a big impact on this kind of tank flushing. Either that or somehow make it impossible to flush out tanks outside of ports.
 
From what I understand, it's the cost of flushing tanks in port that makes the unscrupulous ones do it at sea. When you look at a live ships site, the sheer number of vessels in the Channel at any one time is quite scary.

This is the site I was thinking about for live ship positions , it wasn't working properly when I mentioned it earlier.
 
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