Abstract
ALTHOUGH oil pollution has been a growing hazard to water birds for half a century1, little information is available about how it occurs. Curry-Lindahl2 has remarked that in the Baltic flocks of long-tailed duck, Clangula hyemalis, “very often swoop down just on the patches of oil where the deep sea roll is less heavy; consequently these oil spots serve as veritable death traps”, whereas Casement3 has reported that where Manx shearwaters, Puffinus puffinus, were flying up the Bosphorus the passage of a patch of oil “caused birds to rise a few feet as flocks passed over it and then swoop down again to within a few feet of the sea”. Otherwise widely repeated suggestions that birds positively seek out oil, because it makes the water calm, or resembles food, or tide-rips or shoaling fish associated with the presence of food, seem to be based chiefly on speculation. There has therefore been a need for critical observations of how birds actually do behave when they encounter oil.
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Bourne, W. R. P., in The Biological Effects of Oil Pollution on Littoral Communities (edit. by Carthy, J. D., and Arthur, D. B.), Field Studies Suppl. No. 2 (1968).
Curry-Lindahl, K., in International Council for Bird Preservation (British Section), Report for 1960.
Casement, M., Sea Swallow, 18, 79 (1966).
Bourne, W. R. P., Parrack, J. D., and Potts, G. R., Nature, 215, 1123 (1967).
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BOURNE, W. Observation of an Encounter between Birds and Floating Oil. Nature 219, 632 (1968). https://doi.org/10.1038/219632a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/219632a0
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