Bolsa Chica Oil Spill Wreaks Havoc With Birds; Cause Probed

Sunday-morning hikers could sense something was eerily wrong at Bolsa Chica in Huntington Beach. A thin sheen of oil, first spotted a week ago, glinted on the bird-rich bay. Foul stuff lay thicker still on a nearby flood control channel where it feeds into one of the most famous wetlands in Southern California.

But only the next day did the spill’s enormity start coming into focus. That was when state biologist Tom Napoli followed the channel miles inland and discovered a trail of damage: tainted water, dozens of heavily oiled birds, herons and egrets with oil on their breast feathers, a normally sandy-colored curlew with a sheen so peculiarly green it looked like an exotic zoo animal.

“We went, ‘Holy smokes,’ ” recalled Napoli, an environmental expert with the state Department of Fish and Game who helped oversee the response at Bolsa Chica. Some call the spill the most biologically damaging in Orange County since 1990, when the infamous ruptured tanker called the American Trader blackened miles of coastline.

While television cameras pinpointed oil-soaked birds at Bolsa, biologists worry that many more creatures--fish, insects, mud-dwelling worms, even predatory hawks and possums--may have been harmed if the pollution tainted the mud flats and spread through the food chain. It may never be known, they say, exactly how much the spill damaged.

What makes the Bolsa Chica drama especially troubling, scientists say, is that it brings home how a seemingly small amount of pollution can wreak environmental havoc that may linger for years. When precious remnants of coastal wetlands turn into islands amid the Southern California megalopolis, their wealth of wildlife becomes acutely vulnerable to pollution.

“A lesson here,” said UC Davis wildlife expert Dan Anderson, “is that you don’t need to have a big oil spill to cause a lot of damage.”

Authorities say an unknown culprit dumped 100 to 200 gallons of waste oil into the channel--a minuscule amount compared to the 400,000 gallons of Alaskan crude that spewed into the ocean in 1990 off Huntington Beach.

But that 100 gallons or more headed right for one of the most important oases for migratory birds along California’s Pacific Coast during a season of migration, when birds from Alaska and Canada feed alongside local waterfowl in the spacious mud flats teeming with insects and worms.

“This is one of the largest bird concentrations in Southern California, right here at Bolsa Chica,” said Dr. Scott Newman, a veterinarian with the state Oiled Wildlife Care Network who worked around the clock last week treating dozens of birds.

So a spill that could have been trivial miles offshore delivered a wallop to wildlife, killing at least 45 birds so far, potentially harming or killing several hundred others, and sparking a federal and state cleanup effort that racked up $175,000 in costs over only three days. While most oil was contained in the channel, some escaped into Inner and Outer Bolsa Bay, the long lagoons flanking Pacific Coast Highway.

Investigators say they are still trying to find who caused the spill, which apparently began at a Garden Grove municipal yard near the East Garden Grove-Wintersburg Flood Control Channel more than 13 miles inland. Authorities reported last week that the oil apparently came from a holding tank that was not even designed to hold oil, and Garden Grove officials are blaming an unknown “midnight dumper.”

Authorities describe the pollutant as waste lubricating oil mixed with solvents--a mix that some say can be more damaging than crude oil to birds and other wildlife. Laboratory tests are determining what the oil contained in hopes of identifying the dumper as well as judging how wildlife might be harmed.

Spots of oil on a wild bird’s feathers can act like a hole in a surfer’s wetsuit. They allow water to penetrate the bird’s natural covering, seeping into the trapped layer of warm air within the bird’s feathers.

With their wings weighed down with oil, the birds can’t fly and forage for food, so they run out of energy. They often die in out-of-the-way spots, found only by predators and never counted in the tallies of dead wildlife.

Oil can hurt birds directly: They swallow the potentially toxic oil as they preen their feathers to remove it. And some oil products contain volatile chemicals that can burn their skin and singe their lungs.

Even the birds found and treated can face an uphill battle to regain their health, some experts said.

“There’s so much shock to their systems, they can have a hard time,” said Dorothy Soule, research professor of marine biology at USC.

No one can say exactly how many birds will die, especially during migration season when thousands of birds are swooping along the coast.

As some birds leave the Wintersburg channel and Bolsa Chica, others replace them. While the bulk of oil cleanup is done, one wildlife specialist inspecting the channel Friday saw oil lingering just inland from an earthen berm, with two great blue herons nearby.

“There’s still exposure going on,” said Carol Roberts, contaminants expert with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Both oiled and dead birds have been brought to the Wetlands and Wildlife Care Center in Huntington Beach, one of 23 centers that are part of the statewide care network. Some dead birds have shown signs of being gnawed on by predators--perhaps turkey vultures, red-tailed hawks, coyotes, possums or rats. That means oil may rub off on the scavenging birds’ feathers, or sicken a feeding mammal, Roberts said.

Many questions remain unanswered about the long-term effects of oil in wetlands, although scientific study has intensified since the mammoth 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster and the 1990 American Trader spill. Bolsa Chica may become a laboratory for more study.