According to a startling revelation by the US Fish and Wildlife Service on Tuesday, the number of ‘oiled’ birds cleaned and treated at Louisiana’s International Bird Rescue Research Center has increased from 66 on Friday to
354! 

Moreover, there are 13 ‘oiled’ birds undergoing treatment at the Alabama rescue center, 12 at the center in Florida, and one at the Mississippi rescue center. Till Tuesday, the Louisiana center had returned 36 birds to the wild; while Florida and Alabama centers have released two birds each.

All the oiled birds, mostly brown pelicans, are so excessively coated in the oil – which has been spewing into the natural habitat of these birds since April - that the workers cleaning them have had to add an extra step to the regular washing routine.

Describing the condition of the oiled birds, Jay Holcomb, the executive director of the International Bird Rescue Research Center at Fort Jackson in Venice, said: “These oiled birds are about as bad as you get. They are at the point where they can hardly move because they are so stuck with oil.”

Meanwhile, so far as the dead birds are concerned, figures reveal that nearly all the dead birds that have been brought in thus far have been classified – while 99 of these dead birds were visibly oiled ones, 514 were without any visible oil; nine birds are yet to be classified.