The San Francisco Bay oil spill of January 1971 sparked a remarkable volunteer effort to restore the damaged environment and rescue affected wildlife. Coming less than a year after the first national Earth Day observance in 1970, and less than two years after the disastrous 1969 Santa Barbara Channel oil spill, this event galvanized thousands of area residents who swarmed to the Bay and began pitching straw into the polluted water to soak up oil. People started retrieving oil-coated aquatic birds who were sure to die if they could not be cleaned and somehow nursed back to health. Without human intervention, many thousands of seabirds would perish from toxic chemical exposure and exposure to the elements, their protective insulating feathers being ruined and coated with sticky poisonous bunker oil.
At the time of these events I was working with the Ecology Action collective in Berkeley. This was a grassroots group instrumental in starting the first solid waste recycling centers across the country. We had just completed an educational “survival march” from Sacramento to Los Angeles to point out the emerging global environmental crisis. Ecology Action members were versed at taking the lead on organizing spontaneous volunteer projects. We began to help coordinate the activities of the many people who flocked to the Bay to help.
By the second day of the emergency, word spread that the University of California at Berkeley was donating a warehouse space for use by volunteers to clean and care for injured seabirds. When I arrived at that location in Richmond, I discovered that it was a book repository warehouse used by UC Press. Today this warehouse space is a Columbia Sportswear store.
Practically overnight, the warehouse was transformed into a veterinary first aid and convalescence hospital. Hundreds of birds were being housed in makeshift plywood pens while volunteers undertook the painstaking procedures of cleaning oil from feathers.
We didn’t know how to do what we were setting out to do. It had never been done before, and so we played it by ear. There were hundreds of bird deaths before we figured out effective procedures to remove the oil and restore the animals to health. Only a relative handful of birds brought to us would ultimately survive, but the process of our learning brought into being a new world-wide organization dedicated to this task. There was no doubt that oil spills would continue to occur. Now, a half century later, they continue to foul beaches, pastures and streams as our romance with fossil fuels sours in the age of global climate change. In 1971, volunteers gave birth to the International Bird Rescue Research Center, which continues to exist and respond to frequent ecological emergencies.
During our learning process, Standard Oil of California, today Chevron, provided barrels of mineral oil for use in cleaning the birds. Each bird was soaked in a mineral oil bath and later placed in pens to convalesce. Birds were fed live fish by hand. We worked round the clock. Over the course of many months I rarely left the warehouse and would catch a nap periodically on wooden pallets between stacks of university textbooks.
It became my task to journey to Standard’s Richmond refinery every Friday morning and negotiate reparations payments for the upcoming week. They were providing $1,500 per week, and I presented them with an invoice documenting the supplies needed and costs incurred. At this point there were no recognized labor costs as all of the work was done on a volunteer basis.
Problems emerged when the project stretched beyond weeks into months, and threatened to persist to at least the end of the year. Standard Oil, which had been shamed into action by media coverage, was ultimately not prepared to finance a long-term volunteer endeavor. They balked at the ad hoc structure and lack of a clear organization to interface with. The project would go unfunded unless clear lines of responsibility were delineated.
This raised the issue of possibly incorporating the bird rescue center as a non-profit environmental organization. To do so required specifying a board of directors with salaries and specific responsibilities. I huddled with colleagues and we decided to take a trip to Sacramento to launch the new organization.
With the help of non-profit consultant Raymond Balter, veterinarian James Harris, bird center volunteer colleagues David C. Smith, I was able to draft articles of incorporation for the newly formed International Bird Rescue Research Center. In April we incorporated as a 501 (c) 3 non-profit and began formally accepting payments from Standard Oil. New life with continuity was breathed into the project. Ray Balter, Ralph Steiner and Jim Harris became the first incorporating directors of the new organization.
This however raised a number of new issues that we had to face. It immediately created a schism between those few whose time was compensated for and all those who continued to work as volunteers. People had grown very emotionally attached to the birds that they cared for, and this had to be taken into consideration when contemplating any change in procedures. To complicate matters even more, toward mid-year, the university wanted their book warehouse back. We needed to find a new location in order to continue.
A warehouse space in industrial Berkeley that belonged to the Humane Society was suggested, and we were able to set up shop in new digs without rent.
Tubbs Island
Nursing ailing seabirds back to health was a lengthy and arduous process. The longer the animals remained in captivity, the more likely it became that they would die of any number of bacterial or fungal infections. They needed to convalesce in as close to their natural habitat as we could provide. Seabirds depend upon the structure of their plumage for flotation. It was not simply a matter of removing the oil and then releasing them into the wild. Their water-repellent feathers had gotten disheveled to the point where if they were released into a watery environment, they would sink and drown. They would also freeze because their plumage could no longer provide insulation. They needed to preen and re-adjust their feathers before returning to their natural habitat. There was also a great fear that once released, the birds would fly to the Bay and come into contact with oil once again, as the shoreline and beaches had not been completely cleared of contamination. We needed to find an environment that allowed for a gradual transition from captivity, one that was oil free.
A location called Tubbs Island at the northern tip of San Pablo Bay was identified as a place that could be used to set up our pens and to allow the birds to re-adjust to the wild. At that time it was under administration of the Nature Conservancy. So Tubbs Island became our halfway house for oiled seabirds, the ones who survived their ordeal and were on the way to full recovery. Those of us who continued to work on the project took turns staffing the look-outs at Tubbs Island. We watched our avian patients from duck blinds and kept elaborate notes on their behavior and progress. If a bird registered any type of distress, we were there to retrieve them and place them back into more hands-on intensive care.
Toward the end of this initial bird rescue project, only 198 out of 1,285 received birds survived. That was a survival percentage of slightly more than 15%. But it was a start, and the learning curve quickly turned upwards. Mineral oil was eventually replaced by the relatively non-toxic detergent Dawn, and the convalescence time period was sharply reduced, and so the survival rates, our rates of actual success. increased.