If you stroll along the leslie Spit over the next few months, please smile warmly at the birds you see and wish them luck on their coming southbound journey.
They’ll need it.
The world is small, fragile and interconnected, as many of our local birds will prove when it’s time for them to fly to the oil-soaked Gulf of Mexico come winter.
While we may have become used to images of oiled pelicans, the fact is, the Gulf coastline lies on one of North America’s biggest bird migration routes. And while BP and its entourage may have successfully capped the Deepwater Horizon leak, reports indicate that significant amounts of crude remain trapped in coastline marshes and wetlands – the very areas that attract the northern migrants.
Take our Black-bellied Plovers, which breed in the Far North but enjoy a fleeting yet meaningful relationship with Toronto, passing through on their annual migration.
These dashing black, white and brown shorebirds can be spotted at fine (bird) dining establishments on the Spit and across T.O.’s waterfront.
While they’ll leave town on a full stomach and fare nicely as they pass over Lake Ontario and Lake Erie and swing south at the Mississippi River, they’ll be in for the shock of their lives when they reach the Gulf.
The shellfish, small shrimp and sea worms that await these birds could poison them. This seafood buffet, if not still swimming in oil, will likely bear a toxic load.
To make matters worse, there’s concern the chemical dispersants used to help deal with the oil may further contaminate the food chain.
“The more subtle effects could be slow and long-term,” says Ted Cheskey, manager of bird conservation programs with conservation org Nature Canada. “Degraded food supplies and the accumulation of toxins could undermine the birds’ reproductive success.”
Like the plovers, diving ducks like Red-breasted Mergansers and Lesser Scaups, long-time Spit faves, also crave southern cuisine.
“There are very large numbers of them from the boreal forest southward,” Cheskey says of the mergansers. “They concentrate in fairly big numbers on Lake Ontario and Lake Erie in mid- to late fall, and thousands of them will go down to the Gulf.”
Same with the scaups. While migrant birds travel to multiple destinations, including the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines, the Gulf is a popular hangout.
Ospreys and Double-crested Cormorants, which have rebounded across south-central Ontario in recent years after a close brush with DDT, also fly in significant numbers to the Gulf.
And talk about loony – as many as one-third of Canada’s Common Loons could face peril down south.
“There are some significant numbers nesting in southern Ontario, including ones you’ll see on migration in the Toronto area,” says Peter Ewins, senior adviser for species conservation with World Wildlife Fund Canada. “Some of those birds will use the Mississippi Delta and coastline region as a stepping stone to their main wintering areas.”
The disaster won’t just affect water birds. Bridget Stutchbury, professor of ecology and conservation biology at York University, estimates that 80 per cent of the songbirds that touch down on the Spit or spend the summer there come into contact in some way with the Gulf Coast during their travels.
These include Eastern Kingbirds, Baltimore Orioles and Rose-breasted Grosbeaks. “It’s hard for our songbirds not to go there,” Stutchbury says.
While most songbirds won’t stay on the Gulf, preferring Central and South America, they will be counting on a nutrition break to fuel up for the perilous 18-to-20-hour non-stop flight across the Gulf’s often stormy waters to Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.
“Even though they’re only on the Gulf Coast for a week, it may make or break whether or not they can successfully cross,” Stutchbury says. “It’s a dangerous, energetically demanding trip, and we just don’t know how the oil spill is affecting the food supply they’ll need to make it.”
Of course, the spill will affect migratory birds from across North America, not just those from T.O. Wildlife biologists are banding birds with high-tech tracking devices to better understand the nitty-gritty of the migration patterns and destinations of particular species.
But back to the stink-up in the Gulf. Of the many oil spills over the years, the main rival to the BP disaster was the Exxon Valdez in Prince William Sound in 1989.
Ewins describes its impact as serious but largely localized, in that the West Coast location was neither an important breeding ground nor a stop on a migration route.
The Canadian Arctic, on the other hand, is considered even more of a hot-button than the Gulf. A similar blowout in the Beaufort Sea, where companies like Chevron and ExxonMobil want to drill, could prove at least as nightmarish as BP’s.
“It’s frozen most of the year,” says Cheskey. “Mitigating or resolving a problem would be much more difficult and challenging up there than in the Gulf.”
The southern water body seems far away. But our local fine-feathered friends can help us understand the big picture. “Birds truly tie us together,” Cheskey says.
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