Crude Awakening: Audubon Magazine Tells the Tale of Tar Sands and Bird Habitat
Posted March 8, 2010 in Curbing Pollution, Moving Beyond Oil, Saving Wildlife and Wild Places, Solving Global Warming
Last summer, Audubon Magazine reporter Barry Yeoman travelled north to the open pit mines in Alberta, Canada where a dense form of oil is dug from the earth like coal. He saw the devastation caused by these tar sands mines first hand and has written about them and the surrounding Boreal forests and wetlands in a well-crafted article just published this month. The story includes striking photographs by Jon Lowenstein. The article tells the story of the high price of an oil addiction that leads oil companies to go after ever more costly and destructive forms of fuel for our cars and trucks. The Peace-Athabasca Delta, downstream from the tar sands mines, is critical bird habitat and nesting area for many of America’s migrating birds. Water use and water and air pollution from the tar sands are helping to kill it – not to mention the fears that local communities have for their health.
Barry describes the Delta aptly in this way:
The boat glides between banks lined with cattails and bulrushes that bow as we pass. The only houses along some stretches were built by beavers. A dozen kingfishers keep pace with us, and we spot pelicans and pileated woodpeckers. Marcel points to a distant flash of movement: a bald eagle. This avian display, he says, is nothing. “Some days in the springtime, when the birds are migrating north—oh, man! For days on end there are flocks in the thousands.” The delta, part of North America’s 1.5-billion-acre boreal forest, serves as the convergence point for all four major North American flyways. Some 215 species—including the endangered whooping crane and neotropical migrants like the olive-sided flycatcher and the American wigeon—use its freshwater wetlands for breeding, nesting, or stopping over.
I travelled with Barry to the tar sands and the Peace-Athabasca Delta last summer and I saw and felt the truth that his words describe. Read his story and you’ll have a good sense of the beauty and the danger in this remote part of Canada that is so closely connected to us through the birds that we love. Go to NRDC’s BioGems action page for the Peace-Athabasca Delta and you’ll be able to send a letter to the Environment Minister of Canada asking for tar sands oil expansion to stop so that the birds of the Peace-Athabasca Delta can be protected.
Photo by Jon Lowenstein, Noor Images
Visit NRDC and Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s new social networking site: www.welovebirds.org
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Comments
Dennis Jaques — Mar 8 2010 01:15 PM
Dear Ms. Casey-Lefkowitz,
Your suggestion that one "Go to NRDC’s BioGems action page for the Peace-Athabasca Delta and you’ll be able to send a letter to the Environment Minister of Canada asking for tar sands oil expansion to stop so that the birds of the Peace-Athabasca Delta can be protected." is seriously misguided.
Unfortunately stopping the oil sands production will do nothing to safeguard the waterfowl habitat of the Peace-Atahbasca Delta. I have conducted research and worked with Federal, Provincial and native groups since 1974 on preserving the prime wetlands of the Peace-Athabasca Delta from destruction. The reasons for the massive wetland habitat loss in this magnificent delta have very little to do with the oil sands extraction and EVRYTHING to do with the water regime changes brought about by the Bennett Dam on the Peace River. This dam produced reduced flooding in springtime to recharge the thousands of perched basins in this Delta. My research and careful satellite-based modelling of plant successional dynamics have shown clearly that without changes to this reduced flooding regime (initiated in 1967 with the completion of the Bennett Dam), the wetlands of the Peace-Athabasca Delta will be largely gone by 2035. Please don't jump to erroneous conclusions based upon a single flight through this beautiful Delta.
Susan Casey-Lefkowitz — Mar 8 2010 02:11 PM
Thank you for your comment to my blog. I agree that the dam on the Peace River is a major factor in reduced water flows in the Peace-Athabasca Delta, but it is also acknowledged in Ramsar and other documentation that tar sands extraction has had and likely will continue to have a negative impact on the delta. We think that it is important to connect people to the delta through the birds they love and have them be able to also link threats to the delta and to Boreal bird nesting habitat to their consumption of gasoline.
I have been up to the tar sands and the delta several times, but my conclusions are not simply based on a flyover. We have researched and tried to understand the many pressures that put the delta under threat. Our focus on the tar sands is to highlight one that has an immediate connection to our members in the United States, especially given the current debate around energy and climate.
Connie Simmons — Mar 8 2010 02:21 PM
Dear Ms. Casey-Lefkowitz and Mr. Dennis Jacques,
I appreciate the comments from Mr. Jacque in that the Peace-Athabasca Delta has indeed been impacted by the Bennet Dam, and will most likely be impacted further from the proposed Site 'C' dam on the Peace River near Fort St. John. Add in the wild card of climate change, we have no idea of what the future of the Delta will be in view of water quantity/flow through the seasons.
Mr. Jacques' comment, however, that the future of the Peace-Athabasca Delta will not be safeguarded by stopping oilsands development ignores cutting edge research by ecologist, Dr. Kevin Timoney, who has found significantly raised levels of PAH's, arsenic, mercury and other toxins in the sediment of the Delta. Recent research by Dr. David Schindler and Dr. Erin Kelly also provides evidence that contamination from the tarsands is indeed affecting the health of Athabasca River system.
During the Keepers of the Water Gathering in Fort Chipewyan, August 2008, I heard that there may be signiciant issues with contaminated sediments in the Delta, especially in light of the importance of this biogem for the hundreds of thousands of migratory birds who use the Delta each spring to 'stock up' before dispersing across the Arctic to nest and raise young. How does this increased contamination of sediments impact waterfowl, who bottom-feed on macroinvertebrates and aquatic vegetation? Is there an uptake of contamination into the waterfowl? Does it affect their nesting mortality rates? Good questions that need to be answered.
The Peace Athabasca Delta faces increasingly complex issues, of which current and future oilsands development play a predominant part. Looking at one impact issue only will not give us the answers we seek, or help provide the solutions we need.
C. Simmons,
Watershed Steward,
Athabasca Bioregional Society,
Hinton, Alberta
One voice — Mar 10 2010 06:23 PM
Hmmm... I wonder how Barry got to Fort McMurray? Did he walk? If so, was he wearing shoes? What about the boat did he make a raft with his bare hands and no tools? I bet a million dollars he has a car! AND I bet another million that he lives in a house of some kind...with stuff in it! I bet he has taken some form of medicine before...Asprin anyone? I LOVE these people! It's like a woman who says she is Catholic but is living in sin with her boyfriend, having sex out of wedlock while taking birthcontrol! Nice try Barry!