Natural Resource Damage Assessment

Restoring Birds Through Natural Resource Damage Assessments: The OWCN’s Critical Role

Steve Hampton, California Department of Fish and Game

In the event of an oil spill or other pollution event, state and federal laws allow the government to collect monetary damages for injuries to birds, wildlife, habitat, and human recreational uses of natural resources. In this way, the government seeks to “make the public whole” by implementing restoration projects that will compensate for the injuries. The goal is not just to clean up the oil, but to compensate for birds or other wildlife killed or for the interim during which habitat was lost. The process of quantifying the environmental impacts from an oil spill is called “natural resource damage assessment” (NRDA).

For birds, no one has more experience at NRDA than the trustees in California. The trustees include the California Department of Fish and Game (CDFG), the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the National Park Service (NPS). They have developed a close relationship with spill responders, including OWCN, to obtain the necessary data to assess the impacts of a spill.

Rather than using a price list to place a dollar value on the life of a bird, trustees carefully estimate the benefit of a proposed restoration project and compare that to the injuries from an oil spill. For example, the Common Murre Restoration Project at Devil’s Slide Rock, which restored an extirpated nesting colony, was created to compensate for the 7,488 Common Murres estimated to have been killed by the Apex Houston oil spill of 1986. This project has produced over 1,000 fledged chicks so far and continues to grow.

Damage assessment for bird impacts starts with an estimate of the number of birds killed by an oil spill, and that starts with good documentation from the Wildlife Operations Unit during the response to the spill. That’s where OWCN comes in. While spill response involves many agencies, OWCN plays a leadership role in bird search and recovery. All bird collection teams record the date, time, and location of each bird they collect. Equally important, they also track where they searched and where they did not search, whether or not they found any birds. This allows the NRDA team to estimate how many birds might have been missed. Birds are missed because they die and are scavenged, or float away, or are simply too hard too find, or because a beach was not searched (perhaps because it was inaccessible). After a spill, researchers have even placed dead birds on beaches to examine how fast they are scavenged and how difficult it is to find them.

In the 2007 Cosco Busan oil spill, 2,940 birds were collected (live and dead); 6,849 were estimated to have died. This includes birds collected dead and those that died in captivity. In this case, the number estimated dead is only 2.3 times higher than the number collected, which is relatively low. This is because the search effort during Cosco Busan was quite comprehensive, with relatively few inaccessible or unsearched beaches.

OWCN’s role does not stop at the beaches, however. At the intake center, each bird is identified as to species, photographed, and an oiled feather sample is taken. When individual birds are disputed by lawyers years later, this allows those birds to be analyzed to prove they were correctly identified and related to the spill. Yes, such disputes do happen—regularly.

Since 1990, the trustee agencies in California have recovered over $45 million just for birds, and have implemented a wide variety of restoration projects. Examples include:

• Common Murre colony restoration at Devil’s Slide Rock;
• Rhinoceros Auklet and Cassin’s Auklet restoration at Año Nuevo Island and the Farallon Islands;
• Marbled Murrelet nesting habitat (old growth redwoods) preservation in northern and central California;
• Brown Pelican roost site protection and creation at several sites;
  
• Seabird Protection Network along the California coast to protect nesting colonies from boat and aircraft disturbance;
• Eradication of non-native rats on Anacapa Island to restore ground-nesting seabirds;
• Eradication of non-native rats on islands off New Zealand to restore Sooty Shearwaters, which spend part of the year in California waters.

It is no exaggeration to say that trustee agencies in other states look to California’s trustees as leaders in bird damage assessment and restoration. California’s trustees, in turn, look to OWCN for the data needed to conduct these assessments.