Sea ducks decimated by oil spill are making a comeback
ASPECIES of duck decimated by one of the worst oil spills in shipping history more than 20 years ago is making a remarkable recovery and has more than tripled its pre-spill population.
Common scoters were the worst casualties when the Sea Empress tanker spilled 72,000 tonnes of crude oil and hundreds of tonnes of fuel after it ran aground off the Pembrokeshire coast, near Milford Haven, west Wales, in February 1996.
Of a population of up to 10,000 of the black sea ducks, around 1,700 were washed up on to the shore dead.
But surveys for Natural Resources Wales (NRW) show numbers had recovered to around 17,000 by 2003 and had more than doubled to 36,000 last winter in the Carmarthen Bay Special Protection Area (SPA).
Matty Murphy, senior marine ornithologist for NRW, said: “Wildlife is an important part of our environment, our heritage and our culture in Wales and protecting it is fundamental to our aims as an organisation.
“Common scoters in Carmarthen Bay were the worst casualties of the Sea Empress oil disaster twenty-one years ago.
“It’s such great news that today the numbers of scoters are double the original estimates.”
The figures have been released as NRW provides evidence to the Welsh National Assembly’s Climate Change, Environment and Rural Affairs Committee’s inquiry into the management of marine protected areas.
Specialist aquatic and environmental contractor APEM coordinated the survey and their ornithologist, Helena Voet added: “It’s typically quite hard to get accurate population estimates for common scoter because they tend to be quite widely dispersed in large, irregular aggregations.
“But aerial surveys using our stateof-the-art digital camera systems give us the data that Natural Resources Wales needs in order to properly manage the site.”
The surveys were carried out in December 2016 and February 2017 using thousands of ultra-high resolution aerial photographs.
Carmarthen Bay SPA was the first fully marine SPA in the UK and was created in 2003 purely for wintering common scoter.