What Would Happen if Oil Spilled in Puget Sound?
At the moment, Washington is not prepared to care for the birds that would be sickened in a catastrophic oil spill. Only three permanent facilities in the state is equipped to care for oiled seabirds like the one pictured at the left. If an oil spill along the lines of the disaster in Louisiana or the Exxon Valdez w
ere to happen here, thousands of birds would die.
Please make a donation today and help us build an oil-spill response facility at the West Sound Wildlife Shelter. This will be the only permanent facility in the entire western Puget Sound, standing ready to step in during a crisis.
TO DONATE:
Contact Kol Medina at 206.855.9057 and kol@westsoundwildlife.org; donate online using our secure system; or download and print a pledge form.
Help Us Build an Oil-Spill Response Facility
The Take Flight Project’s waterfowl enclosure will be ready to save the lives of countless shorebirds and seabirds when disasters strike – disasters like the lethal algal bloom that killed hundreds of birds off the Washington State coast last summer.
But the enclosure will have a greater, more immediate affect. By allowing us to better treat our regular (non-oiled) waterfowl patients, we’ll save the lives of countless ducklings, cormorants, great blue herons, and geese. The enclosure will have six self-cleaning pools, plus six additional pools that we can bring in during an emergency like an oil spill. With a first-rate filtration system, the new enclosure will allow our patients to swim and sun themselves with minimal interference from their human caregivers. This will help them heal faster, recover more quickly, and re-develop their swimming muscles so they can return to the wild in great shape.
The Waterfowl Enclosure - Vital Statistics
• 60 by 40 feet in area and 12 feet tall.
• Includes 6 - 12 pools: 6 permanent and 6 emergency.
• The “roof” and “walls” are made entirely of weatherproof rigid wire, allowing the waterfowl to feel as much as possible as though they are out in nature. Each enclosure will have a small, roofed shed-like structure where the birds can hide or escape the elements.
• Each pool in the waterfowl enclosure will be filtered and sterilized every hour, providing the cleanest, healthiest water possible for the patients.
• The Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife supports our effort to built this enclosure for use as an oil spill response facility. At a moment’s notice, additional pools can be added to the waterfowl enclosure, doubling its capacity.
The “roof” of the waterfowl enclosure is made entirely of weatherproof rigid wire. Likewise, aside from a two-foot tall privacy wall along the bottom, the “walls” of the waterfowl enclosure are made entirely of rigid wire. This design allows the waterfowl in any of the seven permanent enclosures within the waterfowl enclosure to feel as much as possible as though they are out in nature. Although not shown on the drawings, each enclosure will have a small, roofed shed-like structure into which the waterfowl can retreat to feel safer or escape the elements.
Each pool in the waterfowl enclosure will be filtered and sterilized every hour. This will provide the cleanest, healthiest water possible for the patients and relieve the hospital staff of the huge burden of bailing out, cleaning, and refilling each pool.
Similar to the flight cage, the waterfowl enclosure is designed so that the seven permanent enclosures can be configured into a smaller number of larger enclosures. Some of the “walls” between the enclosures are moveable, thereby allowing two cages to be turned into one cage. This will be useful when we have a large number of patients of a single species (such as mallard ducks), when we believe it would be beneficial to the patients be able to mix species, and when we have a patient that requires an extra long cage to allow for flight conditioning (such as a pelican).
The most innovative aspect of the waterfowl enclosure is the seemingly empty center section. This section will have piping and a filtration system built into it so that at a moment’s notice additional 3-foot tall pools can be placed into the waterfowl enclosure and connected to the filtration system. In this way, the capacity of the waterfowl enclosure can be immediately doubled in the case of an emergency such as an oil spill or in future years as more capacity is needed.
The Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife supports the construction of the enclosure for use as an oil spill response facility. In particular, this enclosure may be used by the Department as the long-term recovery portion of the response system.
The Flight Cage
