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news for Sonoma, Marin & Napa Counties

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F70C <0= 70C7 FA>D67C Over 70 percent of the world’s population of Lysan albatross breed on the Midway Islands. Defunct military bases are poisoning them.

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How paint from an abandoned Navy base is killing the albatross By Curtis Cartier

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n the video, a mottled Laysan albatross chick waddles slowly in a circle, clacking its beak angrily at the camera. Its scruffy brown wings hang limply at each side, occasionally fluttering and dragging in the soil while the young bird struggles to defend itself from the perceived threat. Around its gray, webbed feet, tiny white flecks dot the ground. “Paint chips,� pronounces University of California assistant researcher Myra Finkelstein, the woman behind the camera, now watching the video on her home PC. “Lead-based paint chips cover the ground in a lot of places. It’s real easy for the young birds to ingest them.� Soon the chick will be dead. The debilitating neurological disease “droopwing� has already sickened its brain

and left its wings paralyzed. If the disease itself doesn’t kill it, infected wounds from broken wings or starvation once its parents migrate most certainly will. For Finkelstein, the bird’s plight isn’t an isolated incident but a familiar scene she’s watched unfold thousands of times on the Pacific islands of Midway. In a 2003 research paper, she showed that paint chips from an abandoned U.S. Navy base on one of the islands are directly responsible for an outbreak of droopwing. And now, her latest study, published in the science journal Animal Conservation, shows the disease causing a substantive drop in Laysan population worldwide, and has inspired the environmental group Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) to file a lawsuit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) for not adequately protecting the threatened seabird.

“Myra’s research showed that up to 10,000 chicks are dying on Midway every year,� says Shaye Wolf, staff biologist with the CBD who said the group filed a notice of intent to sue the USFWS, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Hawaii’s Department of Land and Natural Resources on Feb. 1. “That’s not acceptable. We’re filing suit to start an immediate cleanup of the contamination on Midway so that thousands more birds don’t die from lead poisoning. USFWS has stood by, while there is an immediate solution to the problem: clean up the paint.� Located about 1,250 miles northwest of Honolulu and best known as the site of the decisive 1942 victory by the U.S. Navy over the Japanese, Midway Atoll has a total area of only 2.5 square miles, but is the breeding home of roughly 500,000 pairs of Laysan albatrosses, 71 percent of the &,

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THE BOHEMIAN

03.17.10-03.23.10

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