Wildlife Rescue Series!

The volunteer oil spill response team for the Wildlife Rescue Association of BC (WRA) had an email from J, head of animal care, yesterday to put us on red alert.

There was a land-based crude oil spill Tuesday on Inlet Drive between Burnaby and Port Moody, and the oil is running into Burrard Inlet. As of yesterday afternoon, one oiled Canada Goose had been brought into the wildlife hospital, and several more had been spotted. Emergency containment procedures have been put in place at the spill site, both by the companies involved in the spill and by Burrard Clean, but it was a big spill, and it hit the shoreline, which means animals are automatically in the line of fire.

Focus Wildlife, a California-based company that headed up the animal rescue efforts at Wabamun Lake in 2005, has been brought in to coordinate animal rescue and rehabilitation, and as always, WRA and its volunteers will play a key role in that operation.
If you’ve read my book Flight or Fight, you’ll know a lot about how an oil spill can impact animals in the wild, and how it contaminate whole ecosystems and future generations of animals for years to come. I wrote about a canola oil spill, which you’d intuitively think was less harmful than a crude spill. Crude is highly toxic, true, and can cause burns and other external injuries to the animals it affects. But cooking oil is hardly innocent; believe it or not, it is even harder to wash off a bird (and the wash process is so stressful to a wild animal that it can be deadly), and has been known to linger in an affected ecosystem for as long as forty years.

Click here to read a news story about this latest spill. Meanwhile, I’m headed to the wildlife hospital this morning for my regular Thursday morning shift, and to get the latest news on the spill, which I’ll pass along to you.

Until then …