I left Louisiana to come home to Rhode Island eight days ago. It has practically taken a full week to start feeling recovered and back to normal. I am very glad that I responded to this horrible calamity and in the process gained a lot of unique experience. Fortunately on my thirteenth day down in the gulf I had an opportunity to get out into the field and search for birds. I left from Myrtle Grove-Port Sulfur and proceeded to Barataria Bay. My heart sank and my eyes swelled, there was oil everywhere we went. On St. Mary's point I saw washed up boom that was saturated with oil so heavily that it was as black as tar. The cordgrass was inundated and dead. Snowy egrets and juvenile white ibis were walking through, standing, and feeding in water that was coated with a sheen of oil. I saw a laughing gull that was so heavily oiled that she could barely fly. My colleague and I made a rescue attempt but were left with empty nets and hurting hearts when she escaped with gobs of oil hanging from her legs. Bay Jimmy and Wilkinson Bay were as damaged and oiled as St. Mary's point. Snowy egrets with spots of oil and worn looking plumage's were literally everywhere. The birds looked ragged and most of them looked "wet". I saw brown pelicans holding their wings out like cormorants, a behavior that I have never seen before. I used my iPhone and birdjam to call out to clapper rails that were surrounded by oiled marsh with the hope that we may be able to catch an oiled one. A few rails deep within the marsh, practically impossible to capture with only two people, called back. It saddens me to consider their fate. After ten hours and numerous miles patrolling for birds we only saw a total of a dozen or so boats actively sucking up oil from the shores of an oil impacted marsh. One crew placed bright white boom out and six hours later we saw the same boom dark brown with oil. On our way back to the dock a dolphin jumped four feet from our starboard side and swan with the boat for a few hundred yards. My thoughts are on the plovers and rails...
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