Saturday, March 15, 2014
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A dead red-breasted merganser duck sits on an examine table at the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation's wildlife health unit on Thursday, March 6, 2014, in Delmar, N.Y. (AP Photo/Mike Groll)
DELMAR, New York (AP) - The Niagara River corridor from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario is renowned as a spectacular winter haven for hundreds of thousands of water birds. But this year's bitterly cold season has made it notable for something else: dead ducks.
Biologists say carcasses began piling up by the hundreds in early January after the plunging temperatures started icing over nearly the entire Great Lakes, preventing the ducks from getting to the minnows that are their main source of food. Necropsies on dozens of birds have confirmed the cause: starvation.
"All have empty stomachs. They're half the weight they should be," said Connie Adams, a biologist in the state Department of Environmental Conservation's Buffalo office who has personally seen 950 dead birds.
"This is unprecedented. Biologists who've worked here for 35 years have never seen anything like this," she said. "We've seen a decline in tens of thousands in our weekly waterfowl counts."
It's a phenomenon that has been seen elsewhere along the Great Lakes, with news reports of diving ducks and other waterfowl turning up dead by the hundreds along the southern part of Lake Michigan. They've also been found in Lake St. Clair between Lakes Erie and Huron.
"It's a hard winter for ducks, like everything else," said Russ Mason, wildlife director with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.
Most of the dead ducks seen in the upstate New York are red-breasted mergansers, which breed in northern Canada and Alaska and come south for the winter to the Great Lakes region. In most years, there are periods of freezing and thawing, providing enough breaks in the ice for them to dive for minnows.
But this winter, it's been so bitterly cold for so long that the ice had pushed across 92.2 percent of the Great Lakes' surface area earlier this month, according to federal monitors, just short of the record 94.7 percent set in 1979.
Biologists say the Niagara River also has ice extending up to 100 yards (meters) off shore, creating a shelf where minnows and shiners can hide.
There is evidence some waterfowl gave up and tried to fly farther south but were too weak to do so. Dead birds have been seen along shorelines, on docks and on the ice, their carcasses feasted upon by gulls and bald eagles.
Two weeks ago, Adams said, there were 240,000 water birds in her area's weekly count. Last week, there were 43,000. It's unknown how many birds - which also included such species as scaup, canvasbacks and grebes - migrated elsewhere and how many died.
At the DEC's Wildlife Health Unit near Albany, biologist Joe Okoniewski has refrigerators stuffed with bags of red-breasted mergansers sent by wildlife biologists on Lakes Erie and Ontario. The diving ducks are black and white with a rusty speckled breast, orange bill and an iridescent green head with a shaggy crest on the back.
"The skin is stuck tight to the body wall because there's no layer of fat underneath," Okoniewski said, running a scalpel along the breastbone of a dead merganser. The gizzard and intestine were empty, except for a few normal parasites.
RELATED ON SKYE: 15 Truly Bizarre Creatures of the Deep
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A dead red-breasted merganser duck sits on an examine table at the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation's wildlife health unit on Thursday, March 6, 2014, in Delmar, N.Y. (AP Photo/Mike Groll)
DELMAR, New York (AP) - The Niagara River corridor from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario is renowned as a spectacular winter haven for hundreds of thousands of water birds. But this year's bitterly cold season has made it notable for something else: dead ducks.
Biologists say carcasses began piling up by the hundreds in early January after the plunging temperatures started icing over nearly the entire Great Lakes, preventing the ducks from getting to the minnows that are their main source of food. Necropsies on dozens of birds have confirmed the cause: starvation.
"All have empty stomachs. They're half the weight they should be," said Connie Adams, a biologist in the state Department of Environmental Conservation's Buffalo office who has personally seen 950 dead birds.
"This is unprecedented. Biologists who've worked here for 35 years have never seen anything like this," she said. "We've seen a decline in tens of thousands in our weekly waterfowl counts."
It's a phenomenon that has been seen elsewhere along the Great Lakes, with news reports of diving ducks and other waterfowl turning up dead by the hundreds along the southern part of Lake Michigan. They've also been found in Lake St. Clair between Lakes Erie and Huron.
"It's a hard winter for ducks, like everything else," said Russ Mason, wildlife director with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.
Most of the dead ducks seen in the upstate New York are red-breasted mergansers, which breed in northern Canada and Alaska and come south for the winter to the Great Lakes region. In most years, there are periods of freezing and thawing, providing enough breaks in the ice for them to dive for minnows.
But this winter, it's been so bitterly cold for so long that the ice had pushed across 92.2 percent of the Great Lakes' surface area earlier this month, according to federal monitors, just short of the record 94.7 percent set in 1979.
Biologists say the Niagara River also has ice extending up to 100 yards (meters) off shore, creating a shelf where minnows and shiners can hide.
There is evidence some waterfowl gave up and tried to fly farther south but were too weak to do so. Dead birds have been seen along shorelines, on docks and on the ice, their carcasses feasted upon by gulls and bald eagles.
Two weeks ago, Adams said, there were 240,000 water birds in her area's weekly count. Last week, there were 43,000. It's unknown how many birds - which also included such species as scaup, canvasbacks and grebes - migrated elsewhere and how many died.
At the DEC's Wildlife Health Unit near Albany, biologist Joe Okoniewski has refrigerators stuffed with bags of red-breasted mergansers sent by wildlife biologists on Lakes Erie and Ontario. The diving ducks are black and white with a rusty speckled breast, orange bill and an iridescent green head with a shaggy crest on the back.
"The skin is stuck tight to the body wall because there's no layer of fat underneath," Okoniewski said, running a scalpel along the breastbone of a dead merganser. The gizzard and intestine were empty, except for a few normal parasites.
RELATED ON SKYE: 15 Truly Bizarre Creatures of the Deep
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