DDT May Outlast Eagles

For a quarter of a century, wildlife experts have been struggling to revive a breeding population of bald eagles on Santa Catalina Island that was wiped out by a massive deposit of DDT off the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

But after spending several million dollars and still unable to ensure that the eagle population can survive without considerably more human help, state and federal officials are recommending that the project be abandoned -- stirring impassioned protests from nature lovers, wildlife scientists and Catalina residents.

The island’s eagles are the only resident population of bald eagles breeding along Southern California’s coast and the only ones breeding anywhere in Los Angeles County. But because the fish they eat are still highly contaminated by DDT, they produce eggs too damaged to hatch on their own.

The recommendation to suspend the Catalina program is part of a draft plan by government agencies trying to decide how to spend $25 million of a settlement paid by chemical companies to help Southern California fish and birds recover from a decades-old deposit of DDT on the ocean floor.

Various other projects are proposed, among them building artificial reefs near San Pedro, monitoring peregrine falcons on the Channel Islands and releasing eagles on the northern Channel Islands. In all, $140 million was set aside to repair Southern California’s marine ecosystem. It is the second-largest settlement of a natural resource case in U.S. history, exceeded only by the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989.

From the late 1940s through the early 1970s, millions of pounds of the powerful insecticide DDT were flushed into county sewers at a Montrose Chemical Corp. factory near Torrance and emptied into the ocean about a mile off the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

At depths as great as 200 feet, about 17 square miles of the Palos Verdes Shelf were declared a federal Superfund site in 1996, ranking the ocean floor among the nation’s most hazardous dumpsites.

Today, about 100 tons -- the world’s largest DDT deposit -- remains on the ocean floor there, along with 10 tons of industrial compounds called PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls). The chemicals continue to accumulate in marine life.

After 10 years of litigation, Montrose, six other companies, the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts and about 150 municipalities paid the $140 million in several settlements. Under the consent decree, $38 million must be used to restore local fish, eagles, peregrine falcons and seabirds.

Since the effort to rehabilitate Southern California’s eagles began in 1980, more than 100 have been released on Catalina, and 15 to 20 currently live there.

Wildlife biologist David Garcelon and his team go to great lengths, including the use of helicopters, to remove the eggs from nests atop Catalina’s cliffs and hatch them in incubators at the San Francisco Zoo. They then return the chicks to the nests so they can be raised by their parents.

The introduced birds thrive, but within four to six years, when they begin to mate, they have collected so much DDT in their bodies that they produce eggs with shells so thin that they dehydrate or break under the weight of the parent. The whole process must then be repeated.

Damage Is Severe

Despite such intensive care, the DDT damage is so severe that only 19% of the retrieved eggs have hatched, said wildlife biologist Annie Little of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s office in Carlsbad, Calif.

If the reintroduction program is ended, Catalina’s bald eagles “would probably be gone over the next 10 to 20 years,” said Garcelon, of the Institute for Wildlife Studies in Arcata, Calif. “It depends on our ability to fundraise, but if nothing was done, all the bonds [between breeding pairs] would probably collapse and over time all the eagles would probably disappear again.”

Officials with three federal and three state agencies designated as the public’s trustees in the settlement say that maintaining the project would cost $6 million -- $270,000 per year -- with no guarantee that the eagles would be able to breed on Catalina without human intervention. They say it would be wiser to spend the money on other islands and other birds that are more likely to recover from the DDT.

Banned in the United States in the 1970s, DDT and PCBs break down extraordinarily slowly in the environment and accumulate in animals’ fatty tissues, multiplying in concentration each step up the food chain. Eagles, pelicans and many other fish-eating birds nearly went extinct.

Greg Baker, an official with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and manager of the Montrose Settlements Restoration Program, said it is frustrating to try to rehabilitate Southern California’s marine life because the chemicals have persisted in its environment for half a century and will endure for possibly half a century more.

“We can’t do everything we’d like, and we can’t make the contamination go away,” Baker said. But “we can use these funds to help bring populations of some birds back and provide greater opportunities for people to fish for clean fish. That’s an important action we can take.”

Baker said the decision to propose dropping the Catalina eagles project after this year was heart-wrenching. But he said about $2 million of the settlement money has been spent on the project since 1991, with no end in sight.

Garcelon predicts that DDT levels in Catalina’s eagles may drop low enough within five years that a few will be able to hatch eggs naturally.

But Baker suspects it “will be decades rather than years” before they can routinely hatch eggs without human intervention. “Right now we are fostering chicks into nests where they are likely to be contaminated. Would these chicks be better off being placed someplace else, where they can reproduce on their own?” he said.

Public Input Sought

The trustees are seeking comments from the public on their 445-page draft plan through Monday, and they will meet in early June to discuss any changes. Their decision is expected to be announced this summer.

The agencies plan to divide the first $25 million almost equally between projects benefiting birds and fish through 2010.

Under the trustees’ preferred alternative, $6.2 million would be spent to bring eagles to the more remote and less contaminated northern Channel Islands off Ventura County instead of Catalina. For three years, eaglets have been released in the Channel Islands, but it is too soon to know whether they will reproduce. That project would continue past 2008 only if their eggs hatched naturally.

Also, $6.5 million would help remove predators and enhance nesting areas for pelicans, cormorants and other seabirds on the Channel Islands and in Baja California; $300,000 would be used to monitor peregrine falcons.

So far, about 80 individuals, plus almost 200 more in petitions, have urged the trustees in letters and public hearings to keep funding the Catalina project because watching the bald eagles, the nation’s symbol, has made an indelible impression on them.

Because the island is visited by more than 1 million people a year, and the eagles sometimes fly to the mainland, Southern Californians can observe the majestic birds soaring in the sky year-round. For those reasons, Catalina Island Conservancy President Ann Muscat said, it should be considered a priority over more distant locations in Baja and the northern Channel Islands.

“We take pride in the few eagles that we proudly call our own.... Please don’t abandon us. It feels like you are burning the flag of our country,” wrote Mary Ann Xavier, a Rancho Mirage resident who has spent summers at Catalina’s Avalon Harbor since the early 1990s.

The opinions of scientists vary greatly. Several wildlife biologists told the trustees it was too soon to abandon the project. “Actions by Montrose caused the extirpation of bald eagles from the Catalina Island ecosystem, and settlement funds should be used to undo this damage,” wrote Dirk Van Vuren, a professor of wildlife biology at UC Davis.

Some warned that the ecosystem would not be intact without bald eagles. Their disappearance in part led to golden eagles inhabiting the islands and nearly wiping out a diminutive species of fox.

“Bald eagles were a top predator and they are an essential component of the ecological web of the region,” wrote Richard Brown, an adjunct professor at Humboldt State University’s department of wildlife.

Other marine scientists, however, including several at UC Santa Barbara and UC Santa Cruz, wrote the trustees that discontinuing the Catalina program, at least temporarily, and funding other projects would be a wise decision.

Mark Gold, executive director of the Santa Monica-based environmental group Heal the Bay, questions the entire plan, saying it could waste millions of dollars. He opposes restoring eagles -- even on the northern Channel Islands -- until there is evidence that they can survive on their own.

“The likelihood of success is pretty slim for most of the proposed [fish and bird] projects,” he said. “Before these very limited resources are actually expended to protect those precious endangered species, we’d better be darned well sure that the projects are going to be successful.”

Artificial Reefs

Also under the plan, at least $7.5 million would be used to build two or three artificial reefs. And $1 million would be spent to educate anglers about where to fish to avoid the chemicals, which have been linked to cancer and neurological and reproductive problems.

As much as $3 million would help restore wetlands that are nurseries for halibut and other ocean fish, and $500,000 would enforce no-fishing marine reserves planned around the Channel Islands.

The goal of the reefs would be to replace bottom-dwelling fish such as croakers, which feed in the contaminated sediment, with cleaner fish that feed in reefs and open water.

Their location would be determined after experts reviewed new contaminant data on the region’s fish, which are expected later this year. A prime spot would be off San Pedro unless chemical levels were too high there, Baker said.

Gold said that instead of building reefs, which might not work to protect anglers, trustees should prohibit sportfishing of contaminated species near the Palos Verdes Shelf.

About half of the settlement was awarded to the Environmental Protection Agency, which has proposed to bury part of the deposit under a thick layer of silt. A pilot project has had mixed results, and a final decision by the EPA is expected next year.

If the chemical deposit were sealed, experts predict, poison concentrations in Catalina’s eagles and Southern California’s other animals would decline rapidly.

But, Garcelon conceded, “there’s no guarantees. Some of the [eagle] females out there -- I’d be surprised if they could ever reproduce.”

Videos and photos of the Catalina eagles are available at www.iws.org. Comments to the trustees about their plan can be sent through Monday to Greg Baker at msrpnoaa.gov. Copies of the plan are available at www.montroserestoration.gov.