500 Ducks Trapped in Oil Waste

The Alberta Tar Sands mining projects have long been identified as a threat to boreal birds by the Boreal Songbird Initiative. Extraction of oil from tar sands requires an energy and water-intensive development process, which releases large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Since much of the tar sands sit underneath the boreal forest, their extraction also involves habitat destruction. This week, an incident showed another type of environmental harm when 500 ducks landed and drowned in a pond filled with oil waste. Few birds survived.

"A completely oiled bird would likely sink immediately. We've recovered the ones that we could," said Steve Gaudet, a Syncrude staff member managing the recovery effort.

The company has said it normally has bird deterrents deployed on the three-kilometre-wide lake of waste from early spring until late fall. But the noisemakers and scarecrows were not in place because of the harsh winter weather last week, officials said.

The ducks involved were not identified to species in the article. A picture accompanying the article appears to be of an Anas sp. If anyone knows more about their identity, please leave a comment.

See also Ducks Per Gallon for more context.

Update: This is not the first time that birds have been found dead at a tar sands tailings pond:

-At least 15 species of waterfowl have already been documented as having been killed on Syncrude Tar Sands tailings ponds along with an amazing 22 species of non-waterfowl.

-Research at tailings ponds in the late 1970's based on once a week surveys of two Syncrude tailings ponds observed at least 100-300 birds killed annually. Since this was based only on birds observed floating or on the sides of the ponds once a week there was clearly a larger number of birds that sunk or were unobservable so these numbers represent a minimum mortality from only two tailings ponds.

-At single tailings pond sites, research has documented tens of thousands of waterfowl and other wetland-dependent birds migrating over in periods of weeks during spring and fall migration.

-Based on research at the Alberta tar sands tailings ponds it is well documented that birds are most likely to land on the ponds at night, under weather conditions that restrict visiblity and when surrounding natural lakes and ponds are frozen under such conditions there is a very high risk of large numbers of casualties because waterfowl and shorebirds and other wetland dependent birds normally travel in flocks that can regularly number into the hundreds and sometimes into the thousands or tens of thousands. The conditions under which these large mortality events are likely to occur are also periods when it is unlikely that the ponds are monitored in order to observe mortality events. Because of this it is highly likely that mortality events like this may have occurred more frequently than reported.