Interesting factoid: the young are capable of leaving the nest almost immediately after hatching (after the down dries).
According to the Times graphic:
"Feeds on small invertebrates or oysters. At risk if oil comes ashore or affects their food sources."
Doodled from this photo on Wikipedia Commons.
--*--*--
This little foray into spill-affected wildlife has given me the opportunity to do a lot of thinking recently about our relationship to oil. Our society is almost (if not completely) inextricably linked to petroleum, so I don't think it's realistic to declare that we should stop drilling, stop using petroleum products and byproducts, etc. You could go completely off the grid and still, if you shop at a grocery store, go to the doctor, buy Dawn, be involved with some entity that uses oil or a petroleum byproduct.
That said, because oil is a finite resource, coal requires enormous resources to harvest and the byproduct of both is a chemical compound that causes pollution, I think it's time for us to start looking at other sources of energy and using them as complements to existing sources. Americans are enormously creative and resourceful; it's time to harness some of that intellectual energy to come up with a more multi-faceted energy policy.
(Just to be clear, nuclear energy is off the table, as far as I'm concerned... at least until we can figure out a way to neutralize the waste instead of merely contain it. My grandpa worked for Hanford back in the day; I'm convinced there's a link between my family's past in the Tri-Cities and my wacky autoimmune system.)
So, does my belief that we need to seek out other sources of energy make me a hippie tree-hugger? Maybe. But arguing in favor of finding sources of energy that help preserve my own habitat makes all the sense in the world to me.
