Vanishing Louisiana islands threaten a conservation success story — the long effort to bring brown pelicans back from the edge of extinction.
CHAUVIN, La. — Sliding off the side of her small boat, seabird biologist Bonnie Slaton wades through waist-high water, brown pelicans soaring overhead, until she reaches Raccoon Island.
People are also reading… "Louisiana is rapidly losing land," said Slaton, a researcher at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette."Subsidence and sea level rise are a double whammy." "We're on the front lines of climate change. It's all happening here," said University of Louisiana at Lafayette ecologist Jimmy Nelson.As Slaton and two other biologists walk Raccoon Island's shoreline, the birds alight in a swirling, swooping cacophony that announces the intruders. The calls of a thousand laughing gulls are loud enough to drown out human thought.
Watching a seabird colony reveals at once the promise and fragility of new life. Then suddenly the biologists are wiping white dribbles from their foreheads. After the U.S. DDT ban in 1972, biologists brought pelican chicks from Florida to repopulate empty islands across the Gulf of Mexico. More than 1,200 were released in southeastern Louisiana over 13 years.
Erosion is a natural process, and over the course of thousands of years, most barrier islands rise and fall. Unlike volcanic islands, there is no bedrock here, only layers of silt washed down the Mississippi Delta.
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