Bilge oil dumped in shipping lanes off Newfoundland kills 300,000 birds annually. Will a new law stop this ecological disaster?

Thick fog envelops Pierre Ryan's pickup truck as he and I pile out onto the beach at Point La Haye on Newfoundland's Avalon Peninsula early one morning in late June. A foghorn blasts in the distance, warning ships away from the treachery of unseen rocks. As he has done once a month for the past 21 years, the Canadian Wildlife Service (CWS) wildlife technician is searching for evidence of another kind of disaster: seabirds washed ashore after encountering oil slicks.

Directly offshore lies a vast crossroads for more than 30 million seabirds. Wilson's storm-petrels, shearwaters and other species that breed in the South Atlantic Ocean migrate north in summer to feed in its rich waters. Thick-billed murres and other arctic breeders follow the ice edge southward in winter to the legendary Grand Banks fishing ground. Thousands of ships cross the same banks every year.

We make our way over a dune to the beach, where a plaque marks the site where Basque fishermen landed in the 1500s. This southern coastline of Newfoundland lies along the great circle route - the shortest sailing distance between the Old World and the New - which brought wave upon wave of explorers and immigrants to North America and is still the preferred commercial shipping route across the North Atlantic.

Ryan begins methodically transecting the beach, starting at the most recent high-tide mark, a collection place for all kinds of sea wrack, including oiled seabirds. He is likely to see what happened here only over the past five days. Birds that have been on the beach any longer will have been scavenged or buried by the ceaselessly shifting tide. And since most oiled birds die and disappear at sea, each one found here represents at least 20 more that never reach the shore.

We spot a small tarry deposit on a rocky outcrop, which Ryan probes with his jackknife. This oil is old, "fairly inert," he says, and therefore of little concern. He recalls that oil from the British tanker Kurdistan washed up on this beach when the vessel broke up and spilled 7,100 tonnes of heavy fuel oil in Cabot Strait in 1979. Of the 12,000 to 25,000 seabirds that perished in the spill, hundreds ended up at Point La Haye and other Avalon beaches.

While catastrophic oil spills such as the Kurdistan and the Exxon Valdez grab the headlines, most of the seabirds that drift dead and dying onto Newfoundland beaches are killed by the illegal but routine dumping of relatively small quantities of oily bilge water into Canadian waters. Beach surveys like the one being conducted by Ryan show that at least 300,000 seabirds die this way annually off Newfoundland, greater than an Exxon Valdez disaster every year.

The problem of oiled birds washing up on beaches, first documented in the 1950s, is not unique to the region, but Canada's enforcement has lagged behind that of European countries, and consequently, the number of oiled birds turning up on Newfoundland beaches is disproportionately high compared with other vulnerable regions of the world.

All ships accumulate oily bilge water while operating, due to leaks from engines and machinery, worn seals or accidents. Depending on size and type, ocean-going vessels can produce an average of 2,800 litres of oily waste a day, equivalent to 20 bathtubs full. Separators on board can reduce the oil in the bilge water to at least 15 parts per million, a concentration that does not even create a sheen on the water surface and, therefore, is considered safe for marine life and legal for discharge at sea. Or the oily water can be stored on board for disposal when the vessel reaches port. Far too often, however, negligent ship captains jettison untreated bilge at sea. The resulting carnage of seabirds has been described by World Wildlife Fund Canada (WWF-Canada) as "an ecological disaster in slow motion."

It is a problem in all the world's oceans, but nowhere more than off Atlantic Canada. In recent years, 75 percent of the dead birds recovered in beach surveys here have oiled feathers. Along the southern coast of British Columbia, by contrast, the figure is only 12 percent.

Not all species are affected equally. Because they spend large amounts of time swimming or diving, the most vulnerable are sea ducks, such as eiders, and auks, such as puffins, dovekies and murres. Less vulnerable are gulls, gannets, terns and other aerial species.

Any seabird that comes in contact with oil is likely doomed. Even a drop of oil the size of a quarter causes plumage to mat, allowing frigid water to penetrate the waterproof layer of external feathers and soak the insulating down underneath with near-zero-degree water. It's like a pinhole in a diver's suit. It causes the bird to burn precious body fat, further reducing its insulation, and expend more energy searching for food in a vicious cycle that usually ends in fatal hypothermia. Or the bird may die a slower death from oil ingested in food or while preening. In short, an oiled bird is a dead bird.

Most seabird deaths caused by oil occur in winter, when larger numbers of birds congregate on the Grand Banks, with those from summer breeding colonies in Newfoundland and Labrador joining those from circumpolar colonies. Unscrupulous ship officers also find it less risky to discharge oil during the cold months, when darkness and rough seas make it more difficult for aerial or satellite surveillance to detect spills, and the dumped oil persists longer in cold waters.

More than 80 percent of the oiled seabirds that wash ashore are auks. Of these, thick-billed murres, or turrs as they are called in Newfoundland, are most affected. A huge migration of thick-billed murres takes place as the sea ice pushes them southward from breeding colonies in the eastern Canadian Arctic, western Greenland, Iceland and northwestern Europe. Tragically, they fly and swim thousands of kilometres only to end up in harm's way.

Ryan finds many more oiled birds in the winter months than in summer, when winter storms and ice-covered seas subject the birds to even more stress. And, he says, with three major oiling events, the winter of 2004-2005 was particularly bad. An equipment malfunction on the Terra Nova drilling platform leaked 170,000 litres of oil into the ocean in November (the largest spill in East Coast offshore-drilling history), killing an estimated 10,000 thick-billed murres and dovekies. That was followed closely by what is termed a mystery spill, which killed as many as 8,000 murres. In March, an illegal oily discharge from a ship struck a fiock of eider ducks, killing at least 1,400 - the worst oil-related carnage of eiders on record in Newfoundland. Their remains were found scattered along 300 kilometres of the province's eastern coastline.

"Murres and sea ducks both got a pounding last winter," says Ryan, "from oil and also from hunting."

Thick-billed murres have long been the target of a traditional turr hunt, a once vital winter food source for the residents of isolated outports. Of the shot birds, half are young, only several months old, but already full size. These are replaced in the population the next year.

"Oil isn't as discriminating. It kills any bird, no matter what age," says Richard Elliot, head of CWS's Migratory Birds Conservation Section in Atlantic Canada. Like Ryan, he has studied the problem for two decades. "It has a substantially bigger impact on the population than hunting and natural mortality sources, where young, naive birds die more often."

A murre doesn't reproduce until it is five years old and then it lays only one egg a year. But like most seabirds, it is long-lived, with a lifespan of 25 years or more, which compensates for its low reproductive rate. During a lifetime, a murre can more than make up for the death of its chicks by natural and other causes. But the annual loss of hundreds of thousands of adult birds due to oil pollution could significantly impede population growth, says Elliot.

An international seabird working group, representing several circumpolar countries with thick-billed murre breeding populations, has concluded that Newfoundland is a population sink which is probably contributing to recent substantial declines in Icelandic breeding populations and possibly to longer-term declines in Greenland's breeding numbers.

The notorious case of the Tecam Sea illustrates Canada's inadequate response. On Sept. 8, 2002, a Radarsat satellite image revealed a 116-kilometre-long, 200-metre-wide oil slick in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, 70 kilometres south of the French islands of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon. It was one of the largest oil slicks ever seen in Canadian waters.

Radarsat International notified the Canadian Coast Guard in St. John's, and a surveillance plane was dispatched to verify the spill. A pollution-prevention officer spotted the slick near the only ship in the area, the Tecam Sea, a Panamanian-owned, Bahamian-registered bulk carrier en route from Quebec to Gibraltar. He radioed the ship's captain to inform him that the slick had been tracked to his vessel, but the captain reported back that nothing had been dumped overboard. Regardless, on the authority of Environment Canada, the ship was ordered to port, where the captain, chief engineer and owner were charged with the illegal dumping of oil into Canadian waters. Not long after, oil-covered seabirds began washing ashore at the southwestern tip of the Avalon Peninsula, near Cape St. Mary's Ecological Reserve, one of the most important seabird breeding colonies in Newfoundland.

An inspection of the ship moored in Conception Bay found evidence of a large discharge of oil through the separator. Furthermore, the ship's chief engineer was unable to account for 15,000 litres of used oil in the ship's oil logbook. And, through a process called oil fingerprinting (see sidebar on page 86), samples collected from the slick were matched to samples from the Tecam Sea's bilge.

The evidence implicating the Tecam Sea was airtight, but in April 2003, the federal Department of Justice withdrew the charges - "much to our shock and surprise," recalls George Finney, then director of the Environmental Conservation Branch of Environment Canada in the Atlantic region. The Justice Department questioned whether Environment Canada had the authority to arrest the captain and direct the ship to port. But it is not clear to this day why the government dropped the charges.

Canadian law clearly prohibits the dumping of oil or other deleterious substances that could affect migratory birds in waters out to the 200-nautical-mile limit, but Finney and his colleagues later discovered that the enforcement powers of the Migratory Birds Convention Act might apply only to the 12-nautical-mile territorial zone. The Tecam Sea was 170 kilometres offshore when it was ordered to port. That may have ultimately made prosecutors back off, believing they were unlikely to gain a conviction. Canada's inability to prosecute the Tecam Sea was, in essence, an invitation to ships to pollute Canadian waters.

"The current regulations were designed for seizing a hunter's 14-foot dory used for hunting over limit," says Finney, now president of the conservation organization, Bird Studies Canada. "They weren't designed for chasing multi-tonne merchant vessels around the high seas."

Subsequent parliamentary committee reports suggested that the Justice Department's reason for dropping the Tecam Sea case was ambiguity in the law. It does seem clear, though, that Transport Canada chose not to support Environment Canada's actions. This was a "shameful incident," according to a 2004 report of the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans, especially in light of a recent interdepartmental agreement that was meant to "prevent this kind of bureaucratic turf war."

If more travesties like the Tecam Sea case were to be avoided, changes to the Migratory Birds Convention Act and the Canadian Environmental Protection Act were clearly required as well as clear provisions as to how different agencies would co-operate in each step of the enforcement process. To put some teeth into these acts regarding oil pollution at sea, officials from Environment Canada, the Justice Department and Transport Canada met in April 2003 to come up with a set of regulations that would present clear deterrents.

In May 2004, amendments to these acts were tabled under Bill C-34. The bill died on the order paper when the June 2004 election was called but was reintroduced as Bill C-15 last November and came into force on June 28.

It extends the application of the Migratory Birds Convention Act to the 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone and makes ships' officers and directors of the owning companies personally responsible for violations. Vessels of more than 5,000 tonnes face a minimum fine of $100,000 for a summary conviction and $500,000 for an indictable offence. The legislation also raises fines to a maximum of $1 million, bringing them more in line with penalties imposed by the United States, which are up to 1,000 times the $21,000 average of Canadian fines.

"With Bill C-15," says Environment Minister Stéphane Dion, "Canada is sending a message to the world that we value our marine resources and will protect them by all necessary means."

But having the new legislation in place will not solve all the problems inherent in trying to lower the death toll of seabirds off our coasts. The act is designed to respond to individual spills and identify companies that make a habit of polluting the oceans, what Finney describes as "bad actors." But even with higher fines and better surveillance, the problem will never be solved without industry co-operation.

"Regardless of the law, it's difficult to detect these events when they happen," says Finney. "It's difficult to have an aircraft and pollution-prevention officers deployed to respond to an event that can happen anywhere in a big ocean at any time. So there should be no illusions on the part of the Canadian public that by just passing this bill, we've got the problem solved.

"We have to change the culture of a portion of the industry. There are definitely shipping companies that are good environmental citizens. But there is a notorious group of substandard operators who might take the view that 300,000 dead birds is a fair price to pay for being able to increase profit or cut cost."

Denis Drown of St. John's has more than 45 years of experience in marine transportation as a master mariner and an educator in marine issues, including oil-pollution prevention. He says owners are not averse to spending money on safety and environmental protection, "but what they want to be assured of is that the money's going to be well spent and effective.

"And, of course, what upsets owners is when an incident occurs - and these things are going to happen deliberately or otherwise if you carry oil about - and the public gets upset, the government responds in the only way it knows how: with more regulations. So the industry has to take it on the chin at that point."

Ship operators can become resentful, Drown points out, if they believe the regulations don't do any good or may even be harmful. Criminal prosecution of seafarers, for example, may inhibit the reporting of accidental spills and thus delay cleanups.

One effective way to reduce costs to ship owners as well as wildlife is to open more convenient and better facilities on land for handling oily ship ballast and bilge, according to a WWF-Canada report on the ship-source, oil-pollution problem. Fewer than half the ports in Atlantic Canada can receive bilge slops. This incapacity is one of the impediments to reducing chronic oil pollution in the region.

Aside from the capacity shortfall, the shipping industry would like such a service to be provided free of charge (in other words, funded by taxpayers), even though the cost to discharge oily waste in port could average, on the high end, only about $358 a day, roughly 1.3 percent of the average daily cost of $28,000 to operate an ocean-going vessel and, therefore, hardly prohibitive. A marked decline in the proportion of oiled seabirds was seen, for example, on Germany's North Sea and Baltic Sea coastlines during a period when no-charge disposal facilities were operating, and an increase occurred when a fee was introduced.

WWF-Canada is also calling for better accounting to make shippers track all oily waste and stiffer penalties for failure to do so or for falsification of records. To date, according to Environment Canada, the thoroughness and the frequency of inspections in Atlantic Canada have not been sufficient to curtail the illegal oil dumping. Canada also clearly needs better aerial surveillance. Our efforts are weak compared with other maritime countries, such as the United Kingdom, Australia and the Baltic Sea states. And recognizing that the best solution is to keep birds and ships apart, WWF-Canada is also urging the government to apply to the International Maritime Organization for Particularly Sensitive Sea Areas status for regions where our seabirds congregate. More stringent marine-equipment requirements, shipping routes that give a wide berth, and mandatory reporting as ships enter and leave would reduce the risk to the most vulnerable areas.

Back at Point La Haye, we find some scavenged carcasses of murres, kittiwakes and guillemots, but none of them appear to have been oiled. A week earlier, three oil slicks were spotted 70 kilometres south of Cape St. Mary's, so Ryan is half expecting to see oil-soaked birds coming ashore any time.

At one end of the beach, he climbs an outcrop of rocks. "After I walk the beach, I often come up here and find an oiled bird," he says. "Some will come ashore to rest and find shelter."

Much to his relief, there are no such doomed birds hiding among the rocks today. As we hike back to the truck, Ryan refiects on his grim but vital work. "I hope I'm walking these beaches in 15 or 20 years and that there are no oiled birds at all. That would be great."

Journalist and poet Harry Thurston lives in Tidnish Bridge, N.S. His latest book, A Ship Portrait (Gaspereau Press), is a "novella in verse" tribute to the life and art of the 19th-century painter of ships John O'Brien.

Fingering polluters

On the beach at Point La Haye, Nfid., Canadian Wildlife Service wildlife technician Pierre Ryan spies the deteriorating remains of a northern fulmar, an oceanic bird easily identified by its tubed bill. He picks up the rotting carcass by a wing and passes it under his nose, a routine test to detect any whiff of hydrocarbons. The fulmar is a naturally oily bird, and he concludes that the greasy appearance of the feathers is most likely from natural oils. There is no sign of heavy black oil.

Ryan calls it a zero, meaning there is no detectable oil. In his rating system, a score of three would indicate a heavily oiled bird. To be sure, though, he will send feathers from this bird to Environment Canada's Environmental Science Centre laboratory in Moncton, N.B. Tests conducted there will confirm whether or not the seabird encountered oil spilled or dumped on the high seas. And if it did, another test procedure called oil fingerprinting may pinpoint the actual ship that was responsible.

"Each type of fuel has a distinctive profile," says Art Cook, the lab's head of chemistry. "So with as little as half a gram of oil from a few feathers, we can identify the type that was on the bird."

Using a technique called gas chromatography, which separates the natural and petroleum-based oils based on their unique boiling points, Cook can distinguish between, for example, crude oil carried as cargo and Bunker C oil, which is used as tanker fuel. He can also identify marine diesel, the fuel of choice for coastal vessels. Bilge, a complex mix of water, fuel and hydraulic and engine oil, is more difficult to profile.

But chemists using mass spectrometry can now identify the many classes of organic compounds in a bilge sample and, therefore, its ship of origin. By comparing a bilge profile to a sample from an oiled seabird, Cook says, "I can tell within a very short time if there is a difference."

Like DNA fingerprinting, the technique is useful for eliminating a suspect, but to convict requires rigorous statistical comparisons, says Cook, who, as an expert witness, has used oil-fingerprinting evidence in successful prosecutions of polluters. "Statistically," he says, "we can say with a certain level of confidence that two oils are the same."