SUSCEPTIBILITY TO OIL POLLUTION 



Instances of oiling for a given species are documented to show the extent 

 to which a species is known to be affected by oil. We stressed records from 

 southeastern waters, but few data are available from this area. We report the 

 number killed in major oiling incidents and the proportion this represented of 

 the total number of all birds killed and identified to species. We may have 

 missed reports of oiling for some species. Much of the Old World literature 

 reports oiled birds only by species groups (e.g., gulls, divers, ducks). Some 

 information may be found in Old World regional periodicals unavailable in the 

 United States and not covered by computer-based literature retrieval systems. 



This section refers frequently to an oil-vulnerabity index for birds in 

 the northeastern Pacific developed by King and Sanger (1979). That publication, 

 while valuable, was used with caution since it refers to a different geographic 

 area with a dissimilar environment and a different (but strongly overlapping) 

 species complex. We included some of King and Sanger's index scores in this 

 section, not to indicate the degree of vulnerability in the southeast (although 

 we often think it is similar) , but rather to show the degree of vulnerability 

 in another part of the range. The northeastern Pacific area is important to 

 North American populations of a number of species of waterfowl that regularly 

 occur in the southeast (e.g., Redhead, Canvasback, Lesser Scaup) and that are 

 at risk from oil development activities in both areas. 



In addition, we estimated the overall potential effect of oil pollution 

 and the development of oil resources on the species in the southeast, taking 

 into account the known or suspected vulnerability of the species, its abundance 

 in the southeast, and its abundance elsewhere. 



SPECIES BIBLIOGRAPHY 



At the end of each species account is a species bibliography that contains 

 references to the distribution and biology of the species. Selected references 

 to the species treated are also found in the species bibliography which follows 

 the text in each account. The species bibliography also includes many other 

 citations that provide additional data on the topics briefly covered in the 

 text, as well as on various other aspects of the biology of the species. All 

 citations used in the text are included in the bibliography at the end of this 

 report . 



The species bibliographies are not exhaustive. In his account of the Can- 

 ada Goose, Palmer (1976a) indicated he had seen over a thousand papers dealing 

 with this species. To prepare complete or near-complete bibliographies for many 

 of the species included in this volume would entail the publication of a series 

 of books of many thousands of pages. The emphasis in our species bibliographies 

 is placed on the ecology and behavior of the species. More general works and 

 some distributional literature, are found in the terminal section of the Liter- 

 ature Cited. Although some material on taxonomy, parasitology, hybrids, identi- 

 fication, and disease may be included, we did not specifically search for this 

 material. We covered the world literature because little is known of the 

 biology of many of the waterfowl while they are in the coastal southeastern 



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