The Patch PROLOGUE DUCKS ON A POND The North American Central Flyway exists primarily as a collective instinct in the minds of millions of migratory birds. Whooping cranes and piping plovers, bald eagles and brown pelicans, mallard ducks and Canada geese--in twos and fours, in dozens and scores and vast flocks of thousands, all of them follow the same general path from winter nest to summer breeding grounds and back again each spring and fall. The flyway is a vestige of the last Ice Age, when glaciers spread far south over the wide flat centre of the North American continent. The ice sheet isolated birds to the east and west, where they developed migratory routes on either side. When the glaciers retreated, they carved thousands of ponds and lakes into the prairie. Waterfowl and other migratory birds soon returned to the region, following food and sanctuary north and south along this newly thawed route. It stretches today from the Gulf of Mexico in the south to the Mackenzie Delta on the Arctic Ocean in the north, and it provides habitat and sustenance for millions of birds. In April 2008, obeying those ancient instincts, in response to spring warmth and melting ice, ducks took flight from ponds across North America''s broad plains.
They had wintered in North Dakota and Minnesota, on frigid but unfrozen bodies of water in southern Saskatchewan and British Columbia and on rivers like the North Saskatchewan that cut across central Alberta. They flew north hard and fast, stopping at newly thawed open water along the way to feed. They flew as fast as sixty miles per hour at times, perhaps a thousand feet in the air. In less than a week, thousands of them had reached Alberta''s boreal forest, bound likely as not for the nesting and feeding grounds of the Peace-Athabasca Delta, a waterfowl habitat as bounteous and expansive as the Mississippi. The flyway had been there before there were roads and rails below, before there were cities and towns, before there was industry. The ducks followed a path older than the farms beneath them in southern Saskatchewan, older than the coal mines they passed over in Alberta''s Badlands. Their route predated the internal combustion engine, the pumpjack, and the ingenious two-cone rotary rock drill bit. It was there before the Cree moved west to find fur for trade, before the peoples of the Peace-Athabasca Delta named their homeland Denendeh, perhaps before any Homo sapien had crossed from Asia onto the American land mass.
Each spring, as day''s light stretched into evening and the breeze turned warm, the ducks came north, alighting on thawed ponds to rest and eat before proceeding farther north to the delta to find mates and make nests. And then there would be more ducks to repeat the flight, year upon year, until the ice sheet''s return--an eventuality well beyond the ken of any duck. On April 20, 2008, as sometimes happens in the boreal forests of northern Alberta in spring, snow began to fall. Along the banks where the great Athabasca River makes its final hard turn north toward the delta, the snow that day fell in a formidable blizzard. It stormed for three days, and nearly half a metre blanketed the river banks and the forests of pine and spruce and the lakes and ponds strewn across the landscape east and west of the river. The weather troubled the ducks. The low cloud made it hard to navigate, and the new snow and cold air made open water scarce and harder to spot. Sometime in the evening of April 27 or in the warming dawn of April 28, many flocks of them--mallards, mostly, but also quite a few mergansers, a smattering of other breeds--found a pond in the middle of a broad stretch of treeless ground.
They came in one after the other, each chasing the next down onto the dark calm surface of the water. And one after another, they discovered a strange substance floating on the pond''s surface, a thick dark goo the likes of which they had never encountered before. It was native to the region, but it belonged properly to the hidden depths of soil and sand deep beneath the boreal forest floor. It had no place in the flyway''s ponds a thousand years ago, and it was scarce enough even ten years back that no flock of ducks had ever collided with it in such numbers. Because a duck has never needed to see what is immediately in front of it as it descends upon a pond--or far less need, at least, than it has for seeing distant predators after it lands--its eyes are on either side of its head. Its forward vision thus limited, it isn''t likely to notice its cousins flailing in distress until it too has landed. Landing on a pond is, in any case, the very essence of a duck''s routine. There has never been any need for caution.
The ducks flying low over the boreal forest north of Fort McMurray in this disorienting spring snowstorm were concerned only with finding open water. The pond below was an escape, an oasis, a temporary home. This is how 1,611 ducks came to land on a settling basin at Syncrude Canada Ltd.''s Aurora oil sands mine, a body of water and many other superfluous substances produced during the separation of bitumen from raw oil sands ore. It is better known as a tailings pond. A duck''s feathers are coated in an oily substance secreted by its uropygial gland, which renders the feathers water resistant. A duck floats on water in part because it has a hollow skeleton but also because the uropygial oil prevents it from becoming waterlogged and heavy when it alights on water. If the feathers become coated in petroleum, however, the duck''s defences are neutralized.
A bird born to float on water can sink. Because an oil sands tailings pond contains not just water but also residual bitumen, boreal dirt, heavy metals, and a slow-settling slurry of oil-processing chemicals and fine clays, its surface melts faster than a natural lake. And because this phenomenon is well understood by oil sands producers, tailings ponds are routinely ringed each spring with radar-triggered, propane-fired sound cannons. Even if a mallard duck might not know quite what a propane-fired cannon is, or for that matter why it is, it surely knows to hightail it elsewhere when faced with a sporadic barrage of loud explosions. At Syncrude Aurora, though, the blizzard had slowed down the cannon deployment process. The piles of snow had made it especially difficult to get crews out to the tailings pond, and then the rapid switch back to warm spring temperatures after the snow stopped had turned access roads and the pond''s wide earthen dike walls into a mess of mud and snowmelt. The air around the tailings pond was silent on that April morning. Like any other crude oil, bitumen floats to a pond''s surface at low temperatures.
It flows into a tailings pond "frothed"--aerated as part of the separation process. The bitumen froth won''t mix with water, but it clings eagerly to anything else it encounters, including more of itself. It forms broad mats on the surface of the tailings pond. It''s hard to imagine a more fervent mating of complementary materials than sticky bitumen froth and duck feathers. To the 1,611 ducks on the Syncrude Aurora tailings pond that morning, it must have seemed like the pond itself was rising up to snatch them. And refusing, inexplicably, to let go. * * * Ducks were still landing on the Aurora tailings pond when a Syncrude heavy equipment operator named Robert Colson came upon the scene at nine in the morning on April 28. Colson could see oddly shaped lumps out among the bitumen mats on the pond.
He reported what he''d seen to his boss by radio. Later that morning, an anonymous caller--not Colson--reported the incident to the Fort McMurray office of the Alberta government''s Ministry of Sustainable Resource Development. Todd Powell, the area wildlife biologist in the ministry office, had started his career in the Yukon. The land there could feel barely settled, the population sparse, the wild and rugged landscape remarkably close. The Yukon is a place where even the busiest downtown thoroughfares are sometimes shared with bears, and you meet office workers proficient in the field dressing of moose carcasses. Powell found there was never any question of the value of wildlife or the merit of his work protecting animals from human encroachment. He took a job in wildlife management for the Alberta government in 2007 and relocated with his wife to Fort McMurray. The wildlife was nearby there as well, but he found people''s attention was mostly elsewhere.
The pace of life was faster, the money easier, your average resident far more likely than a Yukoner to be a recent arrival, having little direct experience with the wildlife of the Canadian North. There didn''t seem to be much interest in conservation, population management, species at risk. The city existed to dig oil from underneath the forest. The forest''s inhabitants were an afterthought at best. Powell was out of his office the morning of April 28, but he returned just after lunch to find a voice mail message from an anonymous worker at the Syncrude Aurora site. It described hundreds of ducks mired in the toxic muck of a tailings pond. "This isn''t right," the caller said. "You need to get up here and do something about this.
" Powell called Syncrude''s environmental representative and arranged to meet at the Aurora mine. In April 2008 Fort McMurray was the epicentre of the greatest oil boom in Canadian history, and the boom was just then reaching its zenith. The city''s population had nearly doubled o.