Oil-Coated Pelicans Fail to Breed, U.S. Study Shows : Ecology: The birds didn’t attempt their annual flight to Channel Islands. Researchers say the lull in reproduction may only be temporary.

Oil-soaked brown pelicans that were cleansed and nurtured, then returned to the wild after the Huntington Beach spill, have failed to breed in the year since then, according to a new study sponsored by the federal government.

The sea birds didn’t even attempt their normal annual flight to the Channel Islands breeding grounds, and instead remained around Long Beach Harbor. But researchers said the lull in reproduction may only be temporary.

The new findings, obtained by The Times, are the first details revealed from any research into the lingering ecological damage of the February, 1990, tanker accident that slicked the ocean with nearly 400,000 gallons of crude oil.

Avian scientist Michael Fry said that eight of 21 oil-coated pelicans that were carefully cleaned, tagged with radio transmitters and then released, have disappeared or died, and the rest did not reproduce.

“The birds that were rehabilitated and released showed no breeding at all in 1990,” said Fry, a research physiologist at UC Davis’ avian science department.

Fry said, though, that the pelicans probably will recover this winter, comparingtheir plight to a human who has been sick or under a lot of stress and has temporarily lost interest in mating.

“We are watching for these birds this year to see if they come back to the breeding colonies. My suspicion is that they will,” he said. “In other areas after spills, we’ve seen severe disruption of breeding, but in subsequent years they return to normal.”

Fry’s work on brown pelicans, an endangered species, has not yet been published, but he will discuss it for the first time at a national offshore-oil conference in Santa Barbara next week. The $73,000 research project was funded by the Minerals Management Service, the branch of the U.S. Interior Department that has proposed opening more of California’s coast to offshore oil drilling.

Although the pelicans probably will recover from their reproductive lull this year, Fry said the research shows how severely stressed birds are even if they survive an oil spill and receive medical care.

“It shows exposure to oil is very damaging to wildlife, and it takes a very great effort on the part of people to rehabilitate them,” Fry said.

Of the 21 birds that were tagged and traced, Fry’s team lost contact with six, two were found dead and another suffered a broken wing and now is being cared for by an animal rehabilitation center.

Fry said he believes the six died. He has no evidence of what might have killed them, but he suspects it was oil-related because pelicans usually live long lives. Many birds slicked with oil later die of stress-related starvation or disease.

Local and state environmentalists had not yet seen the study results, but they were disheartened to learn of the lingering harm to the brown pelicans.

“It’s a pretty bleak assessment,” said Victor Leipzig, a Huntington Beach biology instructor and executive director of the Bolsa Chica Conservancy who organized the volunteers rescuing oiled birds. “It shows you’re going to lose a lot of birds no matter how you treat them.”

The study helps prove that spill cleanups are little more than “an environmental Band-Aid” and should serve to warn the Interior Department that more caution is needed in producing and transporting oil, said Daniel Taylor, the National Audubon Society’s Western regional representative in Sacramento.

“Oil spills are extremely dangerous environmental events, and our efforts at cleanup are providing, at best, the most elementary kind of improvement of a disastrous situation,” Taylor said. “There is no safe and secure way to undo the damage of an oil spill.”

On Feb. 7, 1990, the American Trader tanker struck bottom and was ruptured by its own anchor while attempting to moor at a marine terminal off Huntington Beach. It was the worst oil spill in Southern California in nearly 20 years.

Hundreds of volunteers patrolled the beaches to collect sickly, oil-coated sea birds, and international teams of veterinarians and animal experts nurtured them before releasing them back to the wild. Many participants in the cleanup said the bird rescue provided the most haunting, yet also comforting, memories that remain of the five-week-long incident.

“My first reaction to the news is that at some point you have to ask how much good it really does. But we have to keep trying,” Leipzig said. “We can’t afford to lose the large numbers of birds damaged by oil spills, especially the brown pelican, which is hovering at dangerous population levels.”

The rescue effort probably did more to soothe the horror and helplessness of people than it did to assist the animals, Taylor and Fry said. But the work was not in vain, Fry added, because the care the birds received probably contributed to their survival.

“Survival of two-thirds of the animals is very good, especially with the extremely heavy oiling that a lot of these birds got,” he said. “The care was very good, better than in past spills, and I think that the survival will improve as we get better at clinically evaluating the birds. It would not surprise me to see 80% survive in the future.”

As many as 1,500 brown pelicans, recognizable for their broad, powerful wings and big throat pouches for collecting fish, inhabited the area of the spill, and 20% to 50% were probably coated with oil, Fry said. About 100 were found, rehabilitated and then released.

“They have been exposed to a toxic substance, and they come in very sick. Wild birds also get quite stressed when they interact with humans,” Fry said.

Most of the monitored pelicans stayed around Long Beach Harbor last winter instead of flying to their breeding colony on Anacapa Island in the Channel Islands. They were also late flying north for the summer. The birds’ usual pattern is to breed in January and February, lay eggs in March through June and raise chicks in summer.

The pelicans probably lost interest in breeding because being soaked with oil and tended by human hands is so stressful for birds that they focused all their efforts on survival, Fry said. The birds secreted high amounts of adrenal hormones, a sign of stress.

“Birds in any way compromised shut down the ‘luxury’ physiological functions, and in terms of the survival of the individual, reproduction is a luxury,” he said. “For every individual, their own survival comes first, before reproduction.”

Because pelicans have a life span of 20 to 25 years, missing one breeding season is not a crisis for the species, Fox said.

Wildlife officials and environmentalists are concerned, however, about any disruption that causes problems in their breeding, since brown pelicans are on both the state and federal lists of endangered species.

In the early 1970s, only about 1,000 brown pelicans remained, mostly because eggshell thinning caused by the pesticide DDT, which was dumped in large quantities off Los Angeles, nearly wiped out their reproduction. The populations have been recovering well in recent years, after DDT was banned in the United States, and an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 now inhabit California.

Under normal conditions, several thousand brown pelicans reproduce a year. Fry pointed out that last year was a poor breeding year for all pelicans, apparently because of insufficient quantities of anchovies to feed on.

A control group Fry studied had lower than normal reproduction rates too. But Fry said the major distinction is that--unlike the control group--the oiled birds didn’t even try to travel to the Channel Islands to breed.

Fry, who has been studying oiled sea birds for 10 years, conducted similar research after the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska and two other major spills.

Other research evaluating the environmental damage of the American Trader spill to various resources and wildlife is being kept secret by the state attorney general’s office because it is evidence in the state’s negotiations with British Petroleum and three other companies involved in the spill. The yearlong pelican study was commissioned by a federal agency, not a state one, so it did not come under the control of the state office.

State officials are seeking an undisclosed multimillion-dollar settlement from the companies during ongoing negotiations to compensate the public for all impacts of the spill, from loss of tourism and closure of popular beaches to harm to fish and wildlife.

Fry would not comment on how much compensation the state should seek for the injured pelicans, since he is assisting the attorney general with the secret calculations. But he said a rule of thumb among wildlife officials for previous spills is $25,000 per bird.