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By TOM MEADE
Journal-Bulletin Sports Writer

In the first two weeks, volunteers donated more than 2,600 hours of labor to the effort. The Red Cross, Girl Scout troops, duck hunters and animal lovers brought food, money and energy to the center. They built a village of pens and pools.

Tri-State Bird Rescue and Research, a professional wildlife-rehabilitation organization, still is compiling the cash cost of the effort. Eileen Muller, a senior coordinator for the group, says that historically, rescue projects cost between 1 and 3 percent of the overall cleanup.

Though no knows what the North Cape cleanup finally will cost, some estimates place it at over $10 million. "In that case," Muller says, "make the (bird-rescue) cost less than 1 percent."

That would be about $100,000.

As of Wednesday, 6 birds had been released back to the wild and 15 others were still being treated. Eighty-one died.

Was it worth it? (EDITOR'S NOTE: A volunteer gives her answer to that question.)

The question is as much about ethics as it is about economics.

"The mortality was induced by an act of man," says Lori Suprock. "It seems to me that we need to make reparation for it." Suprock is the state Division of Fish and Wildlife biologist in charge at the bird-rescue center.

"The animals that are still alive, they're the strong ones. Their gene pool is the one we want to pass on to the rest of their species," says Muller, the rehabilitator who directed the entire bird-rescue operation.

"I'm not sure," says Dr. Susan Littlefield, the state veterinarian, in charge at the bird center. "It was very, very hard to watch those animals go through what they had to go through. But I think (Muller) is right: A lot suffered and died for the few that live."

When a bird arrived at the rescue center, trained volunteers flushed its eyes, treated it for injuries and warmed it to restore its normal body temperature. They washed the animal in Dawn dishwashing detergent and rinsed it in 103- to 105-degree water, treated to maintain a specific hardness or pH. The bird was dried and housed in special pens and pools. The air in the building was quiet and moist -- like the milking parlor in a dairy.

Birds that clearly were going to die were given lethal injections. Many more birds, however -- birds that already had been stressed by the oil, the cold and the human handling -- were force-fed through tubes inserted down their gullets. A lot of them died anyway.

"If you're asking whether that's inhumane," Muller says, "no one on staff handles animals in an inhumane way. We try to reduce stress to the best of our ability. . . ."

"Why don't we euthanize them? If we become a society where we lessen stress by euthanasia, where does it end?"

Tri-State Bird Rescue & Research, which is supported by grants, individual donations and corporate gifts, is a nonprofit organization with an international reputation for excellence, says H. Lloyd Alexander, wildlife administrator of the Division of Fish and Wildlife in Delaware, where Tri-State has its headquarters. Alexander has worked with the group for nearly 20 years, through several oil spills, major and minor.

"Tri-State started in the 1970s on the Delaware River to deal with a series of major spills" from the many tankers and barges that use the river, Alexander says. As some Tri-State workers were traveling to Rhode Island three weeks ago others were working on two oil spills near Philadelphia.

"They have very high regard (among wildlife experts) as professionals," Alexander says. "Their treatment is veterinarian-driven. Most rehabilitators do what they do out of the goodness of their hearts, but without any medical background."

The other difference between Tri-State and many wildlife rehabilitators is that Tri-State has a written euthanasia policy. "If an animal is not able to return to the wild it is humanely euthanized," says Alexander. "That's different than a lot of rehabilitators who carry agony to the extreme, dragging out death."

Treating Canada geese and such puddle ducks as mallards and blacks contaminated by oil, the group's success rate is as high as 90 to 100 percent, Muller says.

After the recent Rhode Island spill, Rhode Island's 79 percent death rate was so high, she says, for three reasons:

-- Most of the birds were loons and eiders, which spend all of their lives, except for brief nesting periods, on the water. The spill and the birds' treatment on land subjected them to diseases from fungi and bacteria they rarely encounter.

-- "This was an incredibly difficult year for waterfowl: They had a hard summer and an early and brutally cold winter," says Muller. "A lot of animals were coming in underweight."

-- The nature of the oil was "highly aromatic," she said, and it was difficult to remove from the birds' feathers.

Muller has worked a lot of spills. "This spill saw the mortality we expected," she says: around 80 percent.

What she did not expect was the community's involvement in the bird-rescue effort: "This was the most overwhelming response I've seen in my life." Volunteers had to be turned away.

Working side by side in the bird-rescue center, biologist Suprock says, were animal-rights activists and duck hunters, carpenters and care-givers. Each came to the center with a unique set of ethics, and all were focused on 102 displaced and suffering birds.

Why?

"It's an animal thing," says Dr. Littlefield, the veterinarian.

"Animals tug at your emotions," Suprock says. "People feel the need to care for them."

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