Many birds land but few appear to die in the tailings ponds of Alberta’s Oil Sands

Background/Question/Methods

In 2008, several hundred birds landed and died in a tailings pond produced by a mining company in the Oil Sands region of Alberta, Canada.  Two years later, the company was prosecuted under provincial and federal law for failing to deter migratory birds from a toxic product.  At about the same time, a second landing event and the death of several hundred more birds attracted international scrutiny to deterrence and reporting procedures.  Although these procedures have been in place for decades, they have not been subjected to standardization or independent review.  In 2011, we assisted industry and government representatives to develop a standardized monitoring program and then implemented it with them at both reference and industrial sites.  We received and described the data collected from 48 ponds containing process-affected water and an additional 10 ponds containing freshwater.  At each pond, live birds seen or heard within 500 m of a monitoring station were recorded from scan samples of 10 or 30 minutes duration (depending on pond size) once daily.  Searches for dead birds were conducted by foot (shorelines) or boat (inaccessible areas) twice weekly.

Results/Conclusions

Between mid April and October, 2011, we detected a total of 44,687 individuals of 88 species or species groups. Ducks were detected most often, but geese, shorebirds, and gulls were also abundant.  Restricted to detections of landed birds on process-affected water ponds, 3,565 individuals of 94 species were recorded.  Systematic mortality searches logged almost 5000 hours among four actively-producing operators and recorded a total of 70 dead birds, most of them ducks.  Among operators, there was substantial variation in the abundance and diversity of bird detections.  Some of these differences were undoubtedly due to actual differences in bird distribution, but some were likely due to unintended variation among observers.  In collaboration with industrial operators and government, we are refining the monitoring program in 2012 and measuring inter-observer variation. We will also identify the generality of the 2011 season, which suggested that many thousands of birds land annually in process-affected ponds in the oil sands region, but few die immediately as a result.  We found no evidence of death comparable to the mass landings reported in 2008 and 2010.