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Article: 922 of sgi.talk.ratical
From: (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
Subject: Deadly Deceit, SILENT SUMMER--Chernobyl fallout in '86 dosed the earth
Summary: in '86 birds were 1 more warning sign telling what nuclear tech does
Keywords: radioactive contaminants concentrate as they move up the food chain
Date: 3 Dec 1992 21:59:51 GMT
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.
Lines: 435


radioactive contaminants become increasingly concentrated as they move up the food chain

Carson's imaginary spring drew uncomfortably nearer reality in 1986, when a massive and unprecedented decline in landbird productivity was witnessed and documented by ornithologist Dr.David F. DeSante at the Point Reyes Bird Observatory (PRBO) in Northern California. . . .

"Nobody could think of anything to explain this," DeSante said. "So I said, as a joke, `Well it must have been Chernobyl,' and everyone just burst out laughing. Because when the fallout cloud passed over, and when it rained, the radio report said that there was no reason to worry--and no reason to even wash the vegetables and fruit--the amount of radiation is insignificant--don't get alarmed--everything is fine. So we didn't think about it anymore.". . .

At this point in their investigation, according to DeSante, one of his colleaugues remarked, "that is when the Chernobyl cloud was passing over," and urged that they reexamine this hypothesis. This time nobody laughed when Chernobyl was mentioned. . . .

DeSante's explanation as to how Chernobyl fallout could have spurred infant and juvenile bird mortality is based on the fact that radioactive contaminants become increasingly concentrated as they move up the food chain. A startling and disquieting example of this "transfer factor" in action, is that fish that feed on algae and ocean sediments have been found to concentrate radionuclides to levels far surpassing the amounts found in the water in which they live. DeSante suspected that iodine-131, the primary constituent found in North American fallout, was the culprit behind the reproductive failure. . . .

Ornithologists are generally in agreement that birds can be regarded as early warning systems for man because they extremely sensitive to the environment--like the canary in the coal mine. The miner never knew when poisonous gases were accumulating to dangerous levels. When the canary died, the miner hastened to get out. Did birds send a similar message to humanity in the summer of 1986, this time about the dangers of low-level radiation, particulary to especially sensitive members of the human race such as infants and ailing adults?


ALL of us MUST confront this addictive death process while there is still time. Dr. Rosalie Bertell articulates this situation very well: "The classical marks of a social addiction are all present in the nuclear military scenario: secrecy, extreme behaviour, rationalization, lies and self-destructive actions." the most destructive part of addictive behavior--whether in a single person's life or in the life of the entire species--is the practice of denial. Healing can only gain momentum when denial is no longer employed to avoid confronting the disease.

--ratitor


The following is taken from the revised and updated softcover 1991 edition of Deadly Deceit, Low-Level Radiation, High-Level Coverup by Dr. Jay Gould and Benjamin A. Goldman with Kate Millpointer, published by Four Walls Eight Windows, New York, and reprinted here with the permission of Dr. Gould. This chapter was written by Kate Millpointer.


Chapter 3
SILENT SUMMER


Twenty-eight years ago, ecology pioneer Rachel Carlson warned in her prescient book Silent Spring that unless humanity were to stop polluting the biosphere with chemical and radioactive poisons, some future spring would yield "only silence . . . over the fields and woods and marsh."

Carson's imaginary spring drew uncomfortably nearer reality in 1986, when a massive and unprecedented decline in landbird productivity was witnessed and documented by ornithologist Dr.David F. DeSante at the Point Reyes Bird Observatory (PRBO) in Northern California.

"Usually," DeSante said, "there's a lot going on when you walk down the net lanes in July. There are flocks of `punks' [juvenile birds] and family groups of bushtits. Juvenile sparrows are collecting in little groups, and warblers are flying through the trees. The young birds are squeaking and chirping and some of the adults are singing."[21]

But when he walked the net lanes on July 22, 1986, there was a striking change. Instead of the exhilarating songs of multitudes of adult birds involved with their breeding and nurturing activities, and the squeaks and chirps of the fledgling young, he met an ominous silence.

"There just were no young birds," he said, "and the adults had stopped singing. I guess they had just given up."

For more than a decade DeSante, who earned his doctorate in biological sciences at Stanford and has a master's degree in engineering, headed a standardized mist-netting and banding project at PRBO, the landbird biomonitoring program. The young birds get caught in the fine filaments of the mist nets, and then are counted and banded for tracking purposes. Unlike most researchers, who usually concentrate on just one species, DeSante monitored the reproductive success of 51 species of landbirds, which makes him a big-picture ornithologist.[22]

Generally, most banding programs are conducted during the fall and winter, when birds are migrating. However, DeSante conducted his research during the spring and summer breeding season, when thousands of birds nest at PRBO's Palomarin Field Station, located just inside the southern end of the Point Reyes National Seashore in Marin County. As such, his work was unique in North America.

The breeding season had started out auspiciously enough in 1986, and by May it seemed clear that the season was going to be better than usual. Based on the rather high amounts of rainfall California had received that winter, DeSante and his researchers expected landbird productivity to be ten percent above normal. In fact, during the first 30 days of the monitoring period--May 10 through June 8--the capture rate was almost twelve percent above normal.

Then in mid-June, during the fourth of ten ten-day monitoring periods, the researchers observed that the number of birds netted was only 56 percent of the previous ten-year average. Although this was a lower reproductive rate than normal, it is not unusual to see a decrease during that part of the breeding period, according to DeSante. So the researchers dismissed this early indication that something was amiss, expecting to see a rapid improvement.

The improvement never came. Instead, the numbers got worse--almost on a daily basis. By the eighth monitoring period, which occurred in late July, productivity dropped to 24 percent of normal. And this during a time when peak numbers of birds are usually captured. From 1976 through 1985, the average daily capture for July had been more than 30 birds, and 60 and even 90 bird days were common, according to DeSante. But in July 1986, no more than 24 birds were netted in any single day, and there were days when only three birds were captured.

Dismayed by these results, DeSante and his colleagues began an arduous seven-week computer analysis of the captures of newly banded birds for the years 1976-1986, hoping that the data they generated would provide a clue to the mysterious decreases of young birds. They ruled out pesticides, herbicides or other chemicals, since no applications were know to have occurred in the past eleven years within at least two kilometers of the area.[23] And starvation was evidently not a factor, because the food supply was plentiful relative to recent years.

"Nobody could think of anything to explain this," DeSante said. "So I said, as a joke, `Well it must have been Chernobyl,' and everyone just burst out laughing. Because when the fallout cloud passed over, and when it rained, the radio report said that there was no reason to worry--and no reason to even wash the vegetables and fruit--the amount of radiation is insignificant--don't get alarmed--everything is fine. So we didn't think about it anymore."

Acting on the hunch that he was not the only researcher witnessing the plummeting bird populations, DeSante called Dr. Donald L. Dahlsten, at the University of California. Dahlsten has conducted nesting-site, reproductive and life-span studies on mountain and chestnut-backed chikadees at two study sites: Blodgett Forest (since 1972), located in the western Sierra Nevada; and Modoc County (since 1964) in northeastern California, about 350 miles from Sacramento.

Formerly an executive director of "Environment", Dahlsten is professor of entomology and until recently chaired the Division of Biological Control at the University of California in Berkeley. He specializes in how birds control forest insects, with particular emphasis on the disruption of this natural balance caused by over-use of pesticides. Instead of mist-netting juvenile and adult birds, Dahlsten and his coworkers study and band the nestling or baby birds while they are still in the nesting boxes.

When asked by DeSante about how his chickadees were doing, Dahlsten said that Bodgett Forest had been a disaster that year and he did not now why.

"We noticed something was wrong as soon as we saw the first nests," Dahlsten said. "It was one of those black and white things. We were aware that there was a helluva mortality and we could not figure it out. It was the first time I had seen such a failure."[24]

When Dahlsten tallied the 1986 reproductive failures, and compared the results with previous years, he discovered that complete nest failures were at a 15-year high at Blodgett Forest, as were nestling and egg mortality.[25] Once again, pesticides and starvation were ruled out as possible explanatory factors in the unprecedented mortality spikes.

Dr. C. J. Ralph made similar observations at the Lamphere-Christiansen Nature Preserve, North of Eureka, California. Dr. Ralph witnessed a 60 percent decrease in newly-hatched White-crowned Sparrows, compared to the previous four years. An ornithologist and research scientist with the U.S. Forest Service, and adjunct professor at Humboldt State University, Dr. Ralph had independently studied the breeding biology of white-crowned and song sparrows since 1982.

"We don't know if there was unusual mortality, or lack of breeding success, but we didn't have as many juveniles to band in 1986," he remarked late in the summer of 1988.[26] "Our data are nothing in isolation. However, when added together with DeSante's work, it is interesting, because it points to a geographical component." Nevertheless, Ralph suggested that what had taken place could be "coincidence."

Researchers at the Harvey Monroe Hall Research Natural Area in the subalpine Sierra Nevada witnessed significant decreases among Oregon juncos. Nine previous years of data showed that numerous groups of juncos, with 30 to 150 birds per flock, moved up the west slope of the Sierra into the subalpine in the middle to late summer. In 1986, just a few straggling flocks of juvenile juncos were observed, with the largest group comprising only four individuals. And there appeared to be a nearly complete absence of juvenile warbling vireos and black-headed grosbeaks.

These corroborative findings convinced DeSante that the unprecedented reproductive failure was not limited to Palomarin, but had extended over much of northern California. DeSante's data also indicated that the reproductive failures occurred around May 10 or 15, because the first decreases in young were observed three to four weeks later. (Birds captured in the mist-nets are "dispersing young" that have been out of the nest for three or four weeks.) The reproductive decreases of nearly every species of landbird at Palomarin had not started at the beginning of the breeding season, but after about thirty days into it. Beginning on June 9, capture rates of young birds plunged--from 56 percent of normal, to 42 percent, to 39 percent, and finally in late July to only 24 percent of normal. Something very unusual had happened in the early part of May--but what?

Curiously enough, Dahlsten's Modoc County site, located in the far northeastern corner of California, showed reproductive numbers on the high side of normal. Researchers in the southern section of the state, reported the same. The explanation seemed to be associated with the heavy rain that had fallen on most of Northern California on May, 6, but had missed northeastern and southern California.

At this point in their investigation, according to DeSante, one of his colleaugues remarked, "that is when the Chernobyl cloud was passing over," and urged that they reexamine this hypothesis. This time nobody laughed when Chernobyl was mentioned.

When DeSante and his colleagues categorized the bird species according to migratory behavior, habitat preference, and nest location, they found that the decreases were independent of those factors. However, when they classified the species according to foraging behavior, they discovered an astonishing fact--the only species not affected were woodpeckers and swallows.

At first they could not understand why the two groups of species were exempted from the decreases, but knowledge of avian diets provided a clue. They knew woodpeckers feed their young on grubs and beetles, which in turn feed on dying, dead and decomposing wood. Swallows feed their young on flying insects, which, in the vicinity of Palomarin, primarily emerge from flowing water in small creeks that contain decomposing materials.

So whatever had affected the majority of birds at Palomarin appeared to involve the primary production food chain, such as caterpillars and other larvae which eat new plant growth, and are in turn fed upon by many species of birds. Such foods are an important source of forage for warbling vireos and black-headed grosbeaks. During the entire one-hundred days of mist-netting and banding, the researchers did not net one young warbling vireo or grosbeak. DeSante believes no young were produced by those species in the vicinity of Palomarin in 1986.

By mid-September 1986, DeSante had completed a painstaking study of the combined data from Palomarin and from other areas on the West Coast. He found that while the rate of adult birds banded per one-hundred net hours in the summer of 1986 was eight percent below the previous ten-year mean, the rate of young birds banded was 62 percent below the mean. Conversely, better-than-average breeding success occurred for mountain chickadees east of the Sierra Nevada, for the subalpine community on the east slope of the Sierra Nevada, and for those in Southern California. Due to weather patterns, those areas received no Chernobyl fallout.

DeSante also found that the reproductive failures coincided, geographically, with the passage of the May 6, 1986 Chernobyl cloud over coastal Washington, Oregon and northern California. Neither past heavy spring rains, droughts, or other unusual weather conditions such as the 1982-83 El Nino winter of excessive rainfall produced such severe effects on landbird productivity as seen in the summer of 1986. Those past events resulted in only nineteen to thirty-two percent reductions in landbird productivity.

Woodpeckers and bark-gleaners--birds that feed on insects in dead and decaying wood, which absorbs no rainwater and thus no radiation--showed no decline at all. However, birds that feed on insects that feed on new plant growth, showed declines of 63 to 65 percent, and seed-eaters declined by about 50 percent. Circumstantial evidence was strong for DeSante's food chain hypothesis.

DeSante's explanation as to how Chernobyl fallout could have spurred infant and juvenile bird mortality is based on the fact that radioactive contaminants become increasingly concentrated as they move up the food chain. A startling and disquieting example of this "transfer factor" in action, is that fish that feed on algae and ocean sediments have been found to concentrate radionuclides to levels far surpassing the amounts found in the water in which they live. DeSante suspected that iodine-131, the primary constituent found in North American fallout, was the culprit behind the reproductive failure.

The deleterious effects of iodine-131 are relatively well-documented in sheep, cattle, swine, and humans, but no comparable studies have been conducted on birds. Yet it seemed reasonable to DeSante that similar health problems might occur in birds, particularly small insectivorous ones. "Smaller birds ingest more food matter per body weight because they have a faster metabolism and so will take up a larger dose of radiation than larger birds," DeSante explained.[27]

"No others animals would be as sensitive to radiation as baby birds during their first ten days of development. Laboratory radiation studies have been done on chickens. They are very different because they hatch full-feathered and are able to run around right away. They have a long development time in the egg and they are larger and heavier in body weight. The studies that have been done on small birds such as bluebirds and tree swallows subjected them to much higher doses of radiation than Chernobyl produced. So people haven't worked with low-levels of radiation on small birds. That is what needs to be done now."[28]

DeSante wondered if a correlation could be found between the amount of radiation potentially received by the birds in various areas of the United States and their reproductive success. He decided to examine the amounts of radiation measured in pasteurized milk by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) across the United States, and changes in landbird numbers between 1986 and 1987, as recorded by the Breeding Bird Survey, which is conducted under the auspices of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

But birds don't drink milk, so why did DeSante use the EPA milk data? He explained it this way. When radioactive rain falls, it is adsorbed by the vegetation and concentrates on the new growth. Then it is grazed upon by first order, or primary consumers, such as cows--or caterpillars, and other larvae and grazing insects such as grasshoppers. Arboreal insectivores, small insect-eating birds that forage in trees, consume these caterpillars and other larvae, and also feed them to their young. So the amount of radiation picked up in milk is a good measure of the amount of radiation that was picked up by the primary consumers, such as grazing insects, and eaten by the birds.

DeSante further theorized that if there had been significant decreases in the reproductive success of small arboreal insectivores in 1986, the decreases should show up in the population levels of these birds in 1987, as recorded in the Breeding Bird Survey data. Indeed, he found a strong correlation between regional concentrations of iodine-131 in milk, and decreases--between 1986 and 1987--in numbers of small, arboreal, insectivorous birds. For no other birds was there a similar, significant correlation.

He suggested that by virtue of their larger body weight and lesser consumption of grazing insects, birds in other foraging categories were spared the effects of low-level radiation. He concluded that Chernobyl fallout may have adversely affected the reproductive success of small, arboreal, insectivorous birds all across the United States, and that the severity of the effect was related to the amount of radiation that they received.

DeSante also wanted to know if survival from 1986 through 1987 differed from the previous six years for adult birds of different ages. DeSante and his researchers had seven years of survival data for three species of coastal scrub birds at Palomarin: wrentits, Nuttall's white-crowned sparrows, and song sparrows.[29] They found that in 1986-87, the survival rate of old birds of these three species was the lowest in seven years. In sharp contrast, the 1986-87 survival rate of one-year-old and middle-aged adult birds of these three species was the highest in seven years. Presumably, this was because of favorable weather conditions during the winter of 1986-87. At first these anomalous findings perplexed DeSante, because older adult birds generally survive at least as well as young adult birds.

"Older birds are generally a little bit dominant over younger birds, more experienced, better able to find shelter, and they usually have the best territories," DeSante explained. "If the problem were food supply, again the older birds generally do better, are more dominant and thus better able to get food."[30]

As a result of his careful studies of the landbird biomonitoring program at Palomarin, he had discovered that there was a reproductive failure that affected young or embryonic birds. By the time the fledglings were out of the nest, there were sixty-two percent fewer than there should have been. The survival data demonstrated that the very old were affected as well.

Finally, DeSante wondered if the survival of one-year-old birds in 1987 would provide an indication of the magnitude of the reproductive failure in 1986. Again, he compared the number of young birds of the same three species (the wrentit, Nuttall's white-crowned sparrow, and song sparrow) for the seven years 1981-87.

"By the time the 1987 breeding season rolled around, the decrease in young birds [those hatched in 1986] was even greater than the decrease we had detected in the summer of 1986," DeSante said, "suggesting that still more of those birds died later that summer, or at an accelerated rate that winter. And if they did die at an extra rate that winter, isn't that awfully strange. Because those birds that were one- or two- or three-years old survived at a much greater rate. Again, the only birds that survived at a much lower rate in 1986-87 were the young and old."[31]

DeSante suggested that these puzzling results may all agree with the hypothesis that radiation from Chernobyl was the culprit. He said, "I believe that if low-level radiation is working through the immune system, it would preferentially affect the very young, whose immune systems are just developing, and old, whose immune systems are breaking down. And that might be the reason for what we saw in 1986."[32]

Ornithologists are generally in agreement that birds can be regarded as early warning systems for man because they extremely sensitive to the environment--like the canary in the coal mine. The miner never knew when poisonous gases were accumulating to dangerous levels. When the canary died, the miner hastened to get out. Did birds send a similar message to humanity in the summer of 1986, this time about the dangers of low-level radiation, particulary to especially sensitive members of the human race such as infants and ailing adults?


_________________________
[21] Kate Millpointer interview with David F. DeSante, July 5, 1988.

[22] David F. DeSante and Geoffrey R. Geupel, "Landbird productivity in central coastal California: the relationship to annual rainfall and a reproductive failure in 1986," The Condor, 89:636-653.

[23] The quantities of pesticides used, and number of acres sprayed for each agricultural product are prepared quarterly by the California Department of Food and Agriculture.

[24] Kate Millpointer interview with Donald L. Dahlsten, July 14, 1988.

[25] In Blodgett Forest during 1986, 14 of 33 nests failed (42 percent). A high rate of nest failure occurred in 1977, with 13 of 32 failed, but five of these were due to predators. In 1986, two nests failed due to predation, leaving 12 which failed for unknown reasons, or 36 percent. 98 out of 236 eggs died (41 percent). 57 deaths would be expected, based on a 15-year mean of 24 percent mortality. During no year other than 1986 did observed deaths deviate significantly from the expected number. Ibid.

[26] Kate Millpointer interview with C. J. Ralph, September 6, 1988.

[27] Kate Millpointer interview with David F. DeSante, August 8, 1988.

[28] Ibid.

[29] With data from a study known as "The Coastal Scrub Avian Ecology Program," which determined the ages of individual birds by examining their skulls, DeSante was able to follow the lives of individual birds of three species in the coastal scrub habitat at Palomarin. He determined a mean survivorship, that is, the mean number of birds that exist in one year and are still alive into the next year. He classified the adult birds into three groups: one-year old birds; middle-aged birds (two to three years); and old birds (four years or older).

[30] Kate Millpointer interview with David F. DeSante, February 15, 1989.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Ibid.

______________________________



     Of obedience, faith, adhesiveness;
     As I stand aloof and look there is to me something profoundly
     affecting in large masses of men following the lead of
     those who do not believe in men.
                                   Walt Whitman -- Leaves of Grass


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