Just last year the brown pelicans were officially taken off the endangered species list -- living proof that a species brought to the edge of extinction could vigorously come back and stay healthy to once again 'live long and prosper.'
FIRST PESTICIDES, NOW OIL
The first time the state bird of Louisiana was hard hit it was by DDT and other pesticides, resulting in thinning the shells of their eggs, which were then crushed when the adults sat on them for hatching. Pesticides wiped out the pelicans in the 1960s.
Now they are victims of the Deepwater Horizon disaster and being taken from their rookeries to rescue centers. The National Wildlife Federation is worried that the oil spill may put a stop to the pelican's recovery in Louisiana. 
WHAT WILL THAT MUCH OIL DO?
What does hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico do to our wildlife? No, the figures, as of last week, are already 21 million to 46 million gallons of crude oil have been dumped into the Gulf. Neither British Petroleum or our federal regulators apparently have accurate figures for anything involved in the spill.
Pictures of the struggling brown pelican covered in crude symbolizes the damage.
Remember the delightful limerick "The Pelican" by Dixon Lanier Merritt, when you were a kid?
A wonderful bird is the pelican,
His bill will hold more than his belican
He can take in his beak
Food enough for a week,
But I'm damned if I see how the helican.
And that's how a lot of worried scientists feel -- how the hell can the pelican and other oil-covered birds like the northern gannets, laughing gulls and all the others survive? We don't know.
Back at the turn of the 20th century, estimates of the brown pelican population in Louisiana was near 50,000. However, by 1961, no nesting pair could be spotted along the state's entire coast, reports
The New York Times.
DIRE TROUBLE
The pelicans are in dire trouble, as is all of nature. That includes us, the human beings who are ultimately responsible for it all -- those who do not consider worst case scenarios or know first how to combat a disaster before creating its conditions.
"Sea birds covered in oil are only a tiny tip of the
oil pollution iceberg," says
Doug Rader, chief oceans scientist at the New York-based
Environmental Defense Fund, quoted in
The Globe and Mail (Toronto).
No one really knows what will actually happen six months from now, or in a year or even decades from today, as a result of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
THINK BEYOND...
People should start thinking beyond the coast to look at the oil's impact on the water column, the sea floor and the powerful currents that are already transporting crude far from the spill site off the Louisiana coast, said Rader.
"Just about everyone on the planet, one way or another," will feel the impact of this spill, argues Sylvia Earle, the National Geographic Society's explorer in residence and former chief scientist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
As our world's religions tell us, we are all One. Uh-Oh!
And, as Bubba Gump's mama said: "Stupid is as Stupid does."
by Sharon McEachern
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