The bird that may kill Gordon Campbell's 'gateway'
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Vancouver Sun
The bird that may kill Gordon Campbell's 'gateway'
If you missed them, the western sandpipers came through last week on their way to work. They fly from Peru to Alaska each spring, some 14,500 km And I think my commute's a bitch.
There are one to two million of them, and en route, they stop over for a snack at Roberts Bank.
They feed almost exclusively there in the tidal flats along the Delta foreshore, north of the Roberts Bank coal port railbed. That man-made appendage -- which extends five km into the Strait of Georgia to reach deep water -- sticks out like a sore thumb, esthetically and biologically speaking.
The tidal flats there are expansive; they are also gooey. At certain times of the year, when the sun comes out and the muck heats up, there can be a real pong in the air, like a sulphurous fart, and Albertan vacationers on the way to the ferries will roll up their car windows and wonder if the rest of the Pacific will smell as vile.
The sandpipers don't seem to mind it.
It was here Bob Elner discovered the secret of what he calls "the divine slime." Elner is a biologist who used to be with the department of fisheries, until that day he decided it was hard counting things that were underwater and out of sight, like crabs and urchins.
He went looking for something more accommodatingly visible.
He settled on western sandpipers, of which he had a thorough academic ignorance.
He had absolutely no background in ornithology, but he figured his maritime expertise could inform any research he might do on them.
They were shore birds, after all. And they were visible. There were hundreds of thousands of them.
So it would be easy.
"And of course," Elner said, "I was completely wrong. The birds weren't easy at all."
They weren't easy because, Elner found, they weren't sexy, at least from a study standpoint. Much research had already been done on them, and among academics, the prevailing feeling about western sandpipers seemed to be, been there, done that.
Their eating habits had been established. Their morphology had been described. Their migrations, plotted.
Nor were they an endangered species, or what biologists considered a "sentinel species" -- a species whose low numbers or sensitivity to man-made toxicities could be studied as an environmental indicator.
"When I looked at the papers on what the birds fed on, for example, it was already pretty well cast-iron. People had done studies [of sandpipers] for decades. My initial concern was what do I actually find that was something new and meaningful."
Ironically, it was his ignorance of ornithology that served him best. He had no familiarity with the area of research, but neither did he have any preconceived ideas.
So one day, when he did an autopsy on several sandpipers who had died among transmission wires, he was surprised to find that their bellies were completely empty of the small crustaceans and invertebrates that previous studies said should be there.
Instead, they were filled with sand.
Elner began to spend time out on the tidal flats, watching the birds. As a marine biologist, he knew that there could not possibly be enough of the crustaceans or invertebrates to feed that many birds. What, then, were they eating?
More autopsies were done, and microscopic studies of the birds' physiology. An international team of scientists from Japan, France and SFU coalesced around the birds and spent a half-dozen years trying to determine why the sandpipers fed almost exclusively on the Roberts Bank tidal flat.
It was the mud. More precisely, it was the millimetre-thick "biofilm" of bacteria and diatoms atop the mud that was nutrient-rich. The sandpipers weren't feeding on worms and snails, as previous studies said they were: they were snorting mud.
But it wasn't just any mud, it was Roberts Bank mud, where the tides, the Fraser River and relatively calm waters came together to brew a biofilm the sandpipers couldn't get enough of. There might have been two other areas where similar stretches of biofilm existed, Elner said -- in Boundary Bay and off Iona Island -- but they weren't big enough to feed flocks of sandpipers numbering in the hundreds of thousands.
Suddenly, the Roberts Bank mud was more than the source of a bad smell: it was a vital link in the biosphere. It was the primary source of food for sandpipers which, if they did not have access to it, might not have enough energy to complete their migration or breed.
Elner believes there may be an historical precedence for this. When the ferry causeway and coal port railbed were completed, the becalmed tidal area between them reverted to eel grass. The biofilm there disappeared, and the sandpipers no longer feed there in numbers.
Elner began studying the birds in 1991, when their numbers ranged between three and four million.
They are half that now.
Any expansion of the coal port -- which is the keystone in Premier Gordon Campbell's grand Gateway To The Pacific vision -- will first have to go through an environmental assessment that will demand that the western sandpipers and the biofilm they feed on will be assured protection. There is a pleasing symmetry in that something so small and delicate could disrupt something so big and brutal.
Elner, by the way, retires next week. There was a time in his career, not so long ago, when studying biology could make one into a pessimist.
He leaves the field in a better frame of mind.
"I've really liked what's happened over the last few years, where the green agenda has come to the fore . . . where the citizens of the world are far more educated of environmental issues and hugely supportive of them."
It's guys like Elner, of course, who, without any fanfare, have caused this to happen.
pmcmartin@png.canwest.com or 604-605-2905
© (c) CanWest MediaWorks Publications Inc.
If you missed them, the western sandpipers came through last week on their way to work. They fly from Peru to Alaska each spring, some 14,500 km And I think my commute's a bitch.
There are one to two million of them, and en route, they stop over for a snack at Roberts Bank.
They feed almost exclusively there in the tidal flats along the Delta foreshore, north of the Roberts Bank coal port railbed. That man-made appendage -- which extends five km into the Strait of Georgia to reach deep water -- sticks out like a sore thumb, esthetically and biologically speaking.
The tidal flats there are expansive; they are also gooey. At certain times of the year, when the sun comes out and the muck heats up, there can be a real pong in the air, like a sulphurous fart, and Albertan vacationers on the way to the ferries will roll up their car windows and wonder if the rest of the Pacific will smell as vile.
The sandpipers don't seem to mind it.
It was here Bob Elner discovered the secret of what he calls "the divine slime." Elner is a biologist who used to be with the department of fisheries, until that day he decided it was hard counting things that were underwater and out of sight, like crabs and urchins.
He went looking for something more accommodatingly visible.
He settled on western sandpipers, of which he had a thorough academic ignorance.
He had absolutely no background in ornithology, but he figured his maritime expertise could inform any research he might do on them.
They were shore birds, after all. And they were visible. There were hundreds of thousands of them.
So it would be easy.
"And of course," Elner said, "I was completely wrong. The birds weren't easy at all."
They weren't easy because, Elner found, they weren't sexy, at least from a study standpoint. Much research had already been done on them, and among academics, the prevailing feeling about western sandpipers seemed to be, been there, done that.
Their eating habits had been established. Their morphology had been described. Their migrations, plotted.
Nor were they an endangered species, or what biologists considered a "sentinel species" -- a species whose low numbers or sensitivity to man-made toxicities could be studied as an environmental indicator.
"When I looked at the papers on what the birds fed on, for example, it was already pretty well cast-iron. People had done studies [of sandpipers] for decades. My initial concern was what do I actually find that was something new and meaningful."
Ironically, it was his ignorance of ornithology that served him best. He had no familiarity with the area of research, but neither did he have any preconceived ideas.
So one day, when he did an autopsy on several sandpipers who had died among transmission wires, he was surprised to find that their bellies were completely empty of the small crustaceans and invertebrates that previous studies said should be there.
Instead, they were filled with sand.
Elner began to spend time out on the tidal flats, watching the birds. As a marine biologist, he knew that there could not possibly be enough of the crustaceans or invertebrates to feed that many birds. What, then, were they eating?
More autopsies were done, and microscopic studies of the birds' physiology. An international team of scientists from Japan, France and SFU coalesced around the birds and spent a half-dozen years trying to determine why the sandpipers fed almost exclusively on the Roberts Bank tidal flat.
It was the mud. More precisely, it was the millimetre-thick "biofilm" of bacteria and diatoms atop the mud that was nutrient-rich. The sandpipers weren't feeding on worms and snails, as previous studies said they were: they were snorting mud.
But it wasn't just any mud, it was Roberts Bank mud, where the tides, the Fraser River and relatively calm waters came together to brew a biofilm the sandpipers couldn't get enough of. There might have been two other areas where similar stretches of biofilm existed, Elner said -- in Boundary Bay and off Iona Island -- but they weren't big enough to feed flocks of sandpipers numbering in the hundreds of thousands.
Suddenly, the Roberts Bank mud was more than the source of a bad smell: it was a vital link in the biosphere. It was the primary source of food for sandpipers which, if they did not have access to it, might not have enough energy to complete their migration or breed.
Elner believes there may be an historical precedence for this. When the ferry causeway and coal port railbed were completed, the becalmed tidal area between them reverted to eel grass. The biofilm there disappeared, and the sandpipers no longer feed there in numbers.
Elner began studying the birds in 1991, when their numbers ranged between three and four million.
They are half that now.
Any expansion of the coal port -- which is the keystone in Premier Gordon Campbell's grand Gateway To The Pacific vision -- will first have to go through an environmental assessment that will demand that the western sandpipers and the biofilm they feed on will be assured protection. There is a pleasing symmetry in that something so small and delicate could disrupt something so big and brutal.
Elner, by the way, retires next week. There was a time in his career, not so long ago, when studying biology could make one into a pessimist.
He leaves the field in a better frame of mind.
"I've really liked what's happened over the last few years, where the green agenda has come to the fore . . . where the citizens of the world are far more educated of environmental issues and hugely supportive of them."
It's guys like Elner, of course, who, without any fanfare, have caused this to happen.
pmcmartin@png.canwest.com or 604-605-2905
© (c) CanWest MediaWorks Publications Inc.