Birds, pictures of birds in oil

You have probably heard that there was a large oil spill in San Francisco Bay at the end of last week.

It breaks my heart.

Environmental issues, endangered and extinct species, global warming...I find all of them to be painful and heart-wrenching topics, but there's something about oil spills that particularly hurts me. Maybe it's because so many other issues are bigger and more pervasive and more gradual with multiple causes, while events like oil spills are specific, isolated, and preventable occurrences.

I am angry that it happened (how in the HELL do you run into the Bay Bridge?) and I am angered by the city's response to it, but what eats at me most is what happens to the birds. I can't stand it.

Trying to contain the oil:



Boxes of dead birds:



A cormorant that did not survive:



I've been having a lot of dreams about birds the past few days. The most usual situation is that I'm going along, taking care of my birds like normal, and then I enter a room in my house that I had forgotten about. There are all these starving, skeletal birds in there that haven't been fed or watered or loved or played with for months. I am horrified with myself for forgetting them, for neglecting them.