We went to a fishery just outside London where there are a handful of lakes one of which held very large
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We went to a fishery just outside London, where there are a handful of lakes, one of which held very large fish. This toss-pot lake had fishermen all round it, frantically trying to catch the biggest fish of the century-so-far. Despite me not really liking going fishing during the close season, I decided I had to keep my hand in. We went to a fishery just outside London, where there are a handful of lakes, one of which held very large fish. This toss-pot lake had fishermen all round it, frantically trying to catch the biggest fish of the century-so-far. But will the local populations of the most stricken birds recover? Personally I doubt it."It is going to be a very bad nesting season this spring in France and southern England for many species.
Even those which survive may be too stressed to breed."It costs up to £100 to clean each bird rescued from the beaches The LPO is desperate for funds. Contributions can be made out to LPO-SOS Oiseaux Mazoutés, at BP263-17305 Rochefort, France.. Hours into the new century, my fishing buddy Pete and I decided to go fishing (I never fish unescorted). By the summer, it will look as if nothing happened."Will the bird life ever be the same again? Mr Métais said: "Past experience shows that the sea is a great cleanser Yes, the beaches will be cleaned Yes, shore life will recover over a number of years. "This is breaking my back as well as my heart, but we are determined to clean up and we will," he said. "You tell the British tourists that the beaches here will be clean next month.
Why bother to save a few birds? But we don't think like that. To do nothing for these birds would be terrible."On the beach at Saint Clement, the mainly young clean-up volunteers had been joined by Léon Massy, 78, president of the local tourist board. We feed them up first before we clean them with a special product - Nutriclean - which is generally used to wash the victims of serious burns."People say to us we are wasting our time, that thousands of people are dying in disasters all over the world. But they preen themselves constantly, ingesting still more life-threatening oil.Miguel Neau, 23, a biologist and conscientious objector working with the LPO instead of doing military service, said: "So far, we are saving 90 per cent of the birds brought here The crucial thing is not to stress them more.
More than half the birds in the La Rochelle "hospital" are guillemots, usually smart little penguin-like birds, with black and white feathers. Drenched in brown oil, they show no interest in the tiny fish dangled before their beaks. More than 800 birds have been brought here to be medicated against oil poisoning, then fed and cleaned.Fifteen rescue clinics have been set up by the LPO along the French coast. Other birds have been flown for treatment in Cornwall, Belgium and the Netherlands. The Erika sank a long way offshore and the winds and currents took the spill out to sea and then back again. The birds which live far out to sea - guillemots especially, but also puffins and razorbills - have been massacred. Shore birds can always fly to another, cleaner piece of coastline.
Birds of the open sea do not see the oil until it is too late. Anyway, the slick has been so scattered that they have nowhere safe and clean to go."On the outskirts of La Rochelle, in a hastily converted, disused funeral parlour, 20 oil-stained gannets stared at me with disturbingly human, pale-blue eyes. The 10,000 tonnes of barely liquid oil spilt by the Erika has been broken up and blended with the sea by three weeks of tides and currents. It was given a final, destructive spin by the great Christmas gales, which also devastated the pine and cedar forests behind the dunes here.The whole of the northern half of the Bay of Biscay - thousands of square miles of ocean - has become a whirlpool of pollution.
