Gulls, Grunion and Grebes: All Fall Prey to Oil’s Black Plague

From Bolsa Chica State Beach to Newport Beach, dead birds rolled in on black waves.

By Tuesday afternoon, the death toll from last week’s tanker spill off Huntington Beach included hundreds of grunion, 111 sea birds and possibly several seals, although crude oil still has not been confirmed as the cause of the mammals’ death, city and state officials said.

With strong winds pushing the oil to shore, more birds have been killed in the last two days than in the previous five days of the spill. Six of them were California brown pelicans on the endangered list, state Fish and Game spokesman Pat Moore said.

Another 306 birds have been captured alive but covered with oil, including 185 surf scoters (a kind of duck), 46 Western grebes and 24 pelicans, Moore said.

Still, wildlife experts were pleased that rubberized booms and three dikes of sand had so far kept the deadly oil from fragile estuaries in Newport Beach, Huntington Beach and Long Beach.

“Our booms and dikes across river entrances are paying off. Our chances of getting away without a great deal of wetlands contamination are getting better,” said Larry Sitton, wildlife management supervisor for the state Department of Fish and Game.

Steve Goldstein, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Interior, said workers have “triple boomed” Upper Newport Bay where another endangered species, the light-footed clapper rail, makes its home.

“We have on-site monitors who are there around the clock. And as of now, the oil has not hit and it looks like it won’t. Basically we are doing everything we can--and keeping our fingers crossed,” Goldstein said.

In addition to watching and waiting to see what fate the tide will bring, teams of federal and state biologists have taken to the waves in inflatable boats to capture oil-soaked birds that are still at sea.

“We got eight pelicans this morning,” Sitton said.

Also, he said, some oil-soaked birds have turned up quite far from the spill--in Garden Grove, on Doheny State Beach in Dana Point and on a Belmont Shore jetty in Long Beach.

“A lot of birds, very heavily oiled, are making their way to places you won’t expect them to fly,” he said. Consequently, state biologists are making regular patrols along the coast to look for oily birds, he said.

But Sitton urged passers-by who discover oil-soaked birds not to “go charging out to get them.” That will only scare them away, he said. Instead, they should leave them alone, he said, but call Fish and Game immediately.

Most of the 111 birds that were dead by late Tuesday were Western grebes, surf scoters and cormorants.

Oil-covered but still alive were more Western grebes, surf scoters and pelicans as well as five California gulls, four common loons, two Bonaparte’s gulls, one horned grebe, one red-throated loon, one rhino auklet, two common murre, three unidentified gulls, two ring-billed gulls, three western gulls, one sanderling, two Pacific loons, four cormorants, one herring gull, one marbled godwhit, three pigeons, one black scoter, one eared grebe and one ruddy duck.

In addition, hundreds of grunion--small, silvery fish that normally spawn on the beaches in spring and summer--died on the first run of the year Sunday at Huntington Beach when they hit the oily sand, state biologist Paul Gregory reported.

Sunday’s run was “a minor run in the cycle of things,” Moore said. “If it happened in June, you could wipe out years of grunion.”

Still, experts are watching the grunion situation with concern. “It deals with a species fairly low on the food chain that other large fish--halibut or sand bass--feed on,” so serious losses of grunion would hurt other fish, said Jim Slawson, a biologist with the U.S. National Marine Fisheries.

Also a concern was the death of two harbor seals and a sea lion whose carcasses washed ashore during the last week. National Marine Fisheries biologist Joe Cordaro suggested that these may be typical winter “strandings” (deaths) and doubted the animals would have been affected by oil. “They’re not like sea otters, with an undercoat of fur that oil sticks to,” he said.

Still, Cordaro is awaiting the result of necropsies next week on a young harbor seal that died shortly after his capture Friday at the mouth of the Santa Ana River and on another harbor seal that was found dead on the sand Saturday in Huntington Beach. In addition, a dead sea lion was discovered Tuesday north of Golden West Street on the sand in Huntington Beach and the cause of its death is still not known, Cordaro said.

He described as “not oil related” the beaching of a sea lion found at Bolsa Chica State Beach on Saturday in a very decomposed state and a decomposed harbor seal also found that day in Huntington Beach.