How Do You Clean an Oiled Bird?

VENICE, La., June 8, 2010 -- At a warehouse in southern Louisiana, workers in hazmat suits spend their days scrubbing the feathers of hundreds of birds so saturated in crude oil that they can no longer move, let alone fly.

The cleaning process is arduous, for the birds and for the volunteers. It's carried out in a warehouse where fans reduce the 110 degree heat enough to barely get it into double digits. Encased in hazmat suits, they can only work for 20 minutes at a time, and one worker fainted recently.

The birds, the majority of which are brown pelicans, are so coated in the oil that began spewing into the Gulf and these animals' natural habitat in April that workers have had to add an extra step to the washing routine.

"These oiled birds are about as bad as you get," said Jay Holcomb, the executive director of the International Bird Rescue Research Center at Fort Jackson in Venice. "They are at the point where they can hardly move because they are so stuck with oil."

So far, 289 birds have been treated at the center, and 86 were brought more were in on Sunday.

Click here for a slideshow on how the birds are rescued and cleaned

The numbers of oiled birds have been growing rapidly each day as animal control workers drop off crates of the nearly unrecognizable fowl that are picked up from the marshlands off the coast. Other birds, many of which are coming from Grand Isle, Louisiana, are helicoptered in.

The workers, dressed head to foot in protective gear to shield their own skin from the toxins in the oil, begin the cleaning process only after the birds go through a thorough intake process. Veterinarians take blood samples, weigh the birds and do a full physical examination of every bird.

The cleaning begins with the massaging of warmed vegetable oil into the birds' feathers to help break up the stubborn oil.

"It's a pretreatment to loosen up the crude oil," said Holcomb. "But it's another step and more stress for the bird."

"These birds are the birds being filmed out in the field, the ones that a really heavily oiled and just coated," said Holcomb, who led the treatment effort during the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 too. "They look like they were just dipped in it, like fondue, and that's because they plunge into the water to get fish and don't understand what the oil is, and just get covered."