DUCK HAZING
Going to great lengths to keep birds out of tailings ponds
Northern Alberta may now be best known for the basin of crude sitting in sandy deposits below the soil, but the development of the province’s unconventional oil deposits has spawned an even more unconventional side industry: Duck hazing.
Countless birds are killed annually by hunting, hitting windows and wind turbines — the latter dubbed the “Cuisinarts of the Air.” Toronto’s habit of keeping its office towers lit at night kills about 14,000 birds a year.
Yet the image of ducks soaked in oil has become indelibly connected with the evils of the energy industry, as potent a symbol as a polar bear on a melting Arctic icefloe.
The dead birds also have real costs for oil companies, not just in fines, but as bad PR.
“A person who buys a hunting licence kills more birds than we do every year,” said Calvin Duane, manager of environment for Calgary-based Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. (CNR).
“We will spend millions to not kill any ducks.”
Each dead duck has to be reported to the provincial government.
Every time a bird falls into one of the tailings ponds that line the migratory paths of the Athabasca River in northern Alberta, oil company workers must get into a boat to fish it out. So, companies go to great lengths to keep the birds away.
The job used to be done by men in rowboats with noisemakers. These days, millions of dollars are lavished on everything from old-fashioned decoys and propane sound cannons to radar, weaponized sound systems, eerie green lights and the latest in pattern-recognition software.
To look at some of the contraptions used to shoo birds away — orange buoys jimmied with wide-eyed plastic falcons — it’s hard not to contemplate the futility of human endeavour: The multibillion-dollar oil companies operating in northern Alberta can move markets and fuel nations, but they’re spending millions of dollars desperately trying to outwit ducks.
They’ve met with some success: In 2009, 94 ducks were killed on ponds, says the Alberta Ministry of Environment & Sustainable Resource Development. Two years later, that number fell to 74, although freezing rain in 2010 is be- lieved to have been responsible for the deaths of 636 of the birds.
The ponds are an unavoidable by-product of the oil sands. To extract thick bitumen, water is heated and pumped through oilsoaked sand, loosening the valuable crude from sediment. The process uses millions of barrels of water a day that are left contaminated with traces of oil and fine clay.
These tailings are piped to large ponds, where the sediment can settle and the water can be recycled. The process pockmarks
We will spend millions to not kill any ducks
the landscape with kilometreswide lakes that attract birds and other wildlife.
Not every bird that lands on a pond necessarily dies — the amount of oil on the water can vary — but any creature that ends up in the water has to be fished out with large nets. Usually, the government advises it then be euthanized.
In the spring of 2008, a flock of thousands of ducks landed on Syncrude’s pond. They ended up coated in oil, sunk and died.
A judge found the company failed to use bird deterrents “early enough and quickly enough.”
It was fined $3-million, almost half of which was allocated to research on migratory birds.
Syncrude says it has now overhauled its bird-deterrent systems.
“Before the incident in 2008, it was a seasonal system. We had cannons and scarecrows, and we had a team also, but it wasn’t year-round staffing,” said spokeswoman Cheryl Robb.
The company’s radar systems have also been revamped.
“We have [them] monitoring all the ponds that we have. When birds approach, then they activate deterrents,” she said.
“They have 300 falcon modules, flashing strobe lights, highpowered acoustic devices and 100 hyper-spikes that emit a sound in a specific direction.”
In 2011, only 17 birds were killed on Syncrude’s pond.
Nonetheless, it is an everevolving battle.
Timed sound cannons kept birds at bay during the fall migratory season, but they presented two problems: They go off 24 hours a day, keeping workers at nearby campsites awake; and they stop working when the birds become used to regular sound.
“I was ... visiting the other sites that were operating, and there was a mother duck and her ducklings swimming around one of these cannons. They dove and then bang, the cannons went off,” said Darrell Martindale, an environmental performance improvement manager with Shell Canada.
“The mother had timed it. She knew when to dive.”
Thomas Boag, a fish biologist and the owner of Applied Aquatic Research, an environmental contractor, said he’s even seen birds try to nest around the cannons.
In a bid to outsmart the ducks, companies have had to come up with ever-more innovative and expensive solutions.
For example, CNR has adopted a weaponized sound system. Originally developed by the military for crowd control, it’s a white long-range acoustic device (LRAD) trailer fitted with grey panels that look like the electric drums used in the video game Rock Band. It shoots focused sound so loud it can make a human being deaf at one metre.
“It operates 24/7 and it works very, very well,” said Mr. Duane. ‘‘It never repeats the same sound twice.”
The system can also use the sounds of trains and cars to teach ducks tailings ponds are poor places to rest.
With more research, Mr. Duane said the company discovered most migratory birds land at night, making traditional boat teams armed with bear bangers less effective than they could be. Instead the LRAD system is equipped with lasers that light the 10-kilometre pond in an eerie green glow.
“It’s in a band of green that birds find very offensive. They don’t like it,” he said.
Of course, these systems and the research to support it aren’t cheap.
“Millions annually. I am loath to give you the actual number, but it is a very large number,” Mr. Duane said.
A salesman for an avian radar company based in the U.S. said setting up a system similar to CNR’s could cost about $5-million.
Mr. Duane credited the technology in part for the company’s low bird-death rate. In the last 2½ years, only one duck has died.
Mr. Martindale said Shell found a company in Salt Lake City that created solar-powered floating buoys connected to a radar system. When birds are detected, a signal is received through a cellphone circuit, which sets off a propane cannon, a strobe light and an animatronic peregrine falcon that flaps its wings and screeches.
The company now has 26 of the contraptions, powered by five radar stations, which cost about $500,000 each. Shell also employs seven people to refill the propane tanks, conduct maintenance and scare birds.
The company averages nine to 14 bird deaths a year.
“You’ve got to show due diligence,” Mr. Martindale said.
The Migratory Bird Act has “got probably the stiffest penalties of all the federal acts ... You can be fined on a per-day, per-bird basis for not doing something.”
Mr. Boag suggested the costs of failure are far higher than the price of deterrence. He figures the oil companies value each dead duck at $1-million.
“So when you do the math on 60 ducks that die, it’s a quarter of a million hazing ducks to keep them away, versus $60-million in grief and hard costs,” he said.