Some Birds Flee Harm from Fracking, Others Have Been Dying

Birds Flee in the Face of Fracking

>>> In North Dakota, several species are responding to the recent natural gas boom by moving far away from active wells. <<<

From an Article by Laura Dattaro, Audubon Society, October 29, 2015

In recent years, fracking has surged in western North Dakota’s Bakken region—the area had just 200 active oil wells in 2005 but today more than 10,000 churn out approximately 35 million barrels of oil every month. The extraction comes with a price: The grasslands where those oil wells sit are a delicate and threatened ecosystem and the construction isn’t boding well for the birds that live there, according to recent research conducted by U.S. Geological Survey.

“There’s a lot that’s unknown about [fracking’s affect on] the Bakken,” says Sarah Thompson, a USGS scientist. “It’s new and it’s happening really quickly.”

From 2012 through 2014 Thompson and her team surveyed 1,900 acres of land spread across seven counties in northwest North Dakota, counting and identifying any birds they observed in the transformed landscape. Fracking has transformed the flat formerly green expanses of North Dakota into a patchwork of deep red gravel well pads. Each pad is stacked with storage tanks and jacks for pumping oil, and new gravel roads support heavy truck traffic. Natural gas flares burn into the night.

“Everyone could guess that they’re not going to inhabit the gravel well pad,” Thompson says. “But the question was: How far out into the ‘undisturbed habitat’ were birds sensing there was a disturbance?”

After years of surveying the bird populations, the researchers concluded that most bird species are avoiding not only the infrastructure itself, but also the surrounding habitat—in some areas by a distance of more than two football fields. In areas within 500 feet of a multi-bore fracking site, or 875 feet from a single-bore one, bird density dropped by 33 percent. (Multi-bore sites, with bores packed together to minimize total land destruction, are a relatively new concept — and researchers don’t yet know the specifics of why the birds appear willing to get closer to them).

Three species, the Baird’s Sparrow, Chestnut-collared Longspur, and Grasshopper Sparrow, stayed as far as 1,800 feet from single-bore wells.

“Grassland birds do not generally respond well to the introduction of non-grassland habitat,” says Jason Hill, a Vermont Center for Ecostudies researcher who’s studied grassland birds near unconventional oil wells. ‘They are grassland birds for a reason.”

But cause-and-effect threats associated with the bird declines are still unclear. Drilling structures likely provide more abundant perching spots for predatory birds. Habitat destruction reduces food availability. Dust and noise from construction trucks scare wildlife away. “It might be the birds don’t enjoy taking a dust bath every five minutes,” Hill says. “It may be that it’s harder for them to find food. [That kind of research] is what’s critically needed.”

Still, Thompson’s paper does point to at least one potential improvement: The new method of consolidating multiple bores into one well pad is likely to cut down on land use, and would be an attractive financial option for oil companies that need to lease any land they use, Hill says.

Many of these species are under significant stress even without the oil fields. Half of the 10 species Thompson spotted most frequently are seriously threatened by climate change, according to Audubon’s Birds and Climate Change Report. The North Dakota Game and Fish Department considers several species to be of high conservation priority, including the Sprague’s Pipit, which has been a candidate for Endangered Species Act protection since 2010. In its most recent decision the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ruled that oil and gas infrastructure doesn’t pose a threat to the birds’ survival.

Grassland birds have already lost significant space to wind farms and industrial agriculture. That means any help toward preserving the habitat they have left would be welcome. “It isn’t really that any specific threat is particularly damaging,” Thompson says. “It is the cumulative impact of many threats.”

#  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #

Plan for Fracking’s Waste Pits Could Save Millions of Birds

>>> Federal agency aims to save the 500,000 to 1 million birds that die in the industry’s vats of oily residue each year. <<<

From an Article by David Hasemyer, Inside Climate News, June 15, 2015

In parched Jim Wells County, Texas, the glistening pits brimming with oil and gas waste appear to be an inviting refuge for birds seeking a hospitable place to find water and rest.

But the pits offer anything but sanctuary–and safety––for birds. They are filled with oily sludge or liquid contaminated with toxic chemicals used by drillers to frack wells in the booming oil and gas fields of south Texas.

County Deputy Hector Zertuche, the local environmental crimes officer, said the pits become deadly traps for birds. “The birds see these pits and come in and before they know it are covered in oil or chemicals,” he said. “It’s a bad deal.” So Zertuche said he applauds a recent proposal by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to strengthen laws that will protect birds from the oil and gas waste pits as well as from flares that burn off unwanted gas from well sites.

The federal agency announced last month that it is considering the creation of rules that more strictly protect birds––some of them listed as threatened or endangered––from waste pits, flares and two other hazards: electric transmission lines and cell towers.

The nearly century-old Migratory Bird Treaty Act generally affords protections to more than 1,000 species of birds from these hazards, because operators of the facilities are expected to mitigate threats. The goal of the new rules will be to more specifically require operators to employ the best available methods to protect birds.

Fish and Wildlife spokeswoman Laury Marshall Parramore declined to discuss the proposal. Instead she issued a two-sentence statement and referred a reporter to the announcement published in the Federal Register.

Reliable estimates of bird mortality from various hazards are difficult because of a lack of standardized reporting procedures and inadequate reporting by some industries, but the Audubon Society said millions of birds could be saved by addressing the oil and gas and power-line hazards.

Based on federal data, the organization estimates that between 500,000 and 1 million birds die trapped in waste pits each year; power lines and communications towers account for the deaths of as many as 225 million birds a year. No reliable information was available to estimate the number of bird deaths associated with oil and gas flares, which burn with intense heat.

“This is significant change that could save the lives of millions of birds every year,” said Mike Daulton, Audubon Society vice president for government relations. “With the adoption of practical, inexpensive solutions we can put an end to these death traps.”

Beyond being identified as a deadly menace to birds, waste pits remain a noxious source of air and water pollution. InsideClimate News found that waste pits are among the least regulated, least monitored and least understood components in the fracking process, where chemicals and sand are mixed with water and injected under high pressure into wells to shatter rock formations, releasing the oil and gas.

In its public notice of the proposed rule changes, the federal wildlife agency described the grisly fate hundreds of thousands of birds face year from the oil and gas waste pits and flares. “Birds that land on or fall into the pit become covered with oil and may ultimately die from drowning, exhaustion, exposure, or effects of ingested oil,” according to the proposal.

The agency suggests either that the waste pits be covered with netting, or that an alternative method be found for disposing of oil and gas drilling waste, built around a closed containment system.

The rule proposal also seeks to limit the number of birds burned to death by gas flares or entrapped by the pipes, vents and other equipment used in the process to burn off gas that would be impractical to bring to market. It suggests removing perches, installing devices to deter birds from roosting, and covering pipes and other small openings to minimize the number of birds killed.

In 2013, about 7,000 songbirds were killed when they flew over a gas plant in the Canadian city of Saint John, New Brunswick, on a foggy night. Many of the birds were burned by the flare atop a 100-foot tower; others may have become disoriented and flown into the tower or the ground.

“They would circle in around that [flare] and of course with a large flame like that they wouldn’t need to get terribly close to become singed or burned,” zoologist Don McAlpine told CBC News.

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

Tagged as: Birds, drilling, fracking, marcellus shale, natural gas, toxic chemicals, waste pits