Oil and Pollution

Abstract

THE desire for an international conference on the oil pollution of the seas has become increasingly evident since the failure of the Oil in Navigable Waters Act of 1922 and the Washington Conference of 1926 to cope with the trouble, which not only affects sea-birds and fish but also involves economic loss and other dangers. The menace and trouble to bird-life has been abundantly shown (Bird Notes and News, 15, No. 6. 1933) by bird-protection societies in Great Britain, and at the request of the Board of Trade, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals has circulated its coastal branches for recent data to indicate increase or decrease in recent years. Prof. Rudolf Drost says the menace to birds at Heligoland is at its greatest in winter, and it is not unusual to find 50 dead guillemots in a single day (Bird Notes and News, 15, No. 5), and Dr. G. W. Field (Bird Lore, Sept.-Oct., 1932) says a continuous oil-film stretches at least 500 miles outside New York harbour and off Cherbourg, France, and a continuous sheet 100 miles in diameter was seen by him between France and Newfoundland. In a pamphlet on “The Bacteriology of Pollution in Relation to Inshore Fisheries”, issued by the South Wales Sea Fisheries District Committee, 1930, Commander E. Kirkpatrick, fishery officer, directed attention to the failure of inshore fishermen through pollution, and to eye-trouble and blistered arms of stake-net fishermen in the South Wales area due to contact with glutinous, oily and acid matter when cleansing nets from the tarry residue borne on the tide. The oil trouble was first noticed on the Lancashire coast affecting sea-birds in 1916, when it was attributed to oil from submarines, but in P. J. Ralfe's 1931-1932 report on the “Birds of the Isle of Man” it is noted that “very little has been heard of oiled birds”.