Oil’s well that ends well for seabirds taking flight again
Nature Minister on hand to see creatures return to sky
EIGHT of the seabirds found covered in ‘oil’ along Ireland’s east coast have now been released back to the wild following rehabilitation by wildlife volunteers.
Nature Minister Malcolm Noonan, who supported the relief efforts with €50,000 emergency funding, was on hand to see three of them return to the skies in Wicklow on Tuesday morning.
He told us: “This is quite emotional to release these three birds this morning of the 140 birds that were affected by this.
“This could have been a far worse incident the team at Kildare Wildlife Rescue have been telling us.
“I just want to comment on all the volunteers at Kildare Wildlife Rescue, people who alerted the authorities to the birds that were found and it’s a huge voluntary effort that shows the huge importance first of all, of trying to support.
“From our perspective, we provided some emergency funding, but this goes way beyond that in terms of the hours that have been put in by volunteers to try and rehabilitate these birds and get them back to a condition where they could be released today.”
Kildare Wildlife Rescue and Birdwatch Ireland led efforts to rescue and treat the impacted seabirds but around 70 have died, with 30 having to be put to sleep.
Dan Donoher from Kildare Wildlife Rescue said: “We’ve had eight released, we have another 65 at the centre and we had 96 alive ones come in at the time but about 30 of them had to be euthanised with further 40 were found dead at the time of the oiling.”
The source of the pollution that left the birds oiled still remains a mystery.
It was suspected that an incident in England’s River Mersey may have been the source but a spokesperson for Defra told us the “oil spillage”,
reported on April 25 on the jetty at Rock Ferry waterfront, “was mostly confined to the sand or the structure, with minimal dispersion in the water”.
They added: “The Environment Agency are actively to any ongoing work in the area.”
Environment Minister Eamon Ryan asked the Environmental Protection Agency to investigate the source of the pollution after Coastguard efforts to locate it in Irish waters proved unsuccessful.
We also contacted Natural Resources Wales and HM Coastguard
to ask if they had received any pollution incident reports.
A HM Coastguard spokesperson said: “HM Coastguard has no current reports of pollution or oiled wildlife in the Irish Sea.”
The Welsh authorities said they also had no reports of “oil pollution along the coast”.