Just over a week ago, the Cosco Busan container ship collided with the San Francisco Bay Bridge and leaked 58,000 gallons of toxic fuel oil into the Bay. As Plutonium Page diaried here already, the spill is the largest in the Bay since 1996 and poses untold environmental damage to both humans and a perpetually vulnerable ecosystem. Salon.com has a poignant piece up today about why the timing of the disaster -- right in the middle of birds' winter migratory season -- is particularly tragic:
Every fall millions of birds fly south from their summer breeding homes in Alaska's tundra and Canada's boreal forests, bound for the warm climes and plentiful food of South America. Along the way more than 1 million stop, sometimes for the entire winter, in the San Francisco Bay, the largest estuary on the West Coast. This year the birds, some of them not a year old, alighted on the bay, weakened from their long flight, aiming to feed and rest for the long journey ahead, only to find that their sanctuary had become a toxic-tainted stew.
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