A pair of ducks paddled toward the bank of the aptly named Muddy River on Monday, heading away from a state employee in a kayak who was trying to coax them toward the riverbank, where people in white jumpsuits stood ready with nets to catch the oil-covered birds.
“I would give them some space, let them walk up,” Zak Mertz, CEO of the New England Wildlife Centers, said to his fellow wildlife rescuers.
Mertz’s team has been capturing birds here and bringing them to their veterinary hospital since an oil leak was reported on Sunday. The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection is investigating how the oil got into the river, which winds through the Emerald Necklace park between Brookline and Boston. The cleanup effort is expected to take several days, and it will likely be about three weeks before the birds are cleaned up and recovered enough to be returned to the wild.
Trying to corral just those two ducks was not an easy task. The birds turned around and headed for a small island in the river, where more wildlife rescuers were waiting for them. Despite all the attention, they didn’t fly away.
“These ducks are not flying because what’s happened is the oil has broken their natural waterproofing. And so not only are they covered in oil, but they’re also saturated with water,” Mertz said. “They probably are not thermoregulating well, meaning that, it’s cold out tonight, without that air trapped against their body from the feathers, a night like this could be deadly to them.”
Shortly after the ducks reached the island, a rescuer managed to grab one of them.
“Got it!” Mertz said victoriously. “All right, that’s great to see. So they’re going to get him in a bin, get him off the island, and then we’ll get him into a warm, warm car where they’ll be shuttled back to our hospital in just a little bit.”
The team kept trying to get the other duck.
Mertz said they’ve already brought in several dozen birds, but it’s not clear how many more need their help.
“My guess is we’ll probably be out here for a few more days as we work our way through, from the most critical to the ones that are just mildly oiled,” he said.
Artificial barriers have been stretched across the narrow and winding river to absorb the oil and stop it from flowing downstream.
Less than 100 gallons of oil leaked into the river, according to Morgan Arsenault, an environmental analyst with the Department of Environmental Protection. She said it could be home heating oil from a corroded tank.
“It’s somewhere under the ground right now,” she said. “And we are currently trying to figure out where it is. If there’s no tank that we can actually physically see because the tank has already been removed, maybe it’s just oil that was prior released, and now we have to find out where it’s sitting and then remove that.”
The oil could potentially come from miles away, Arsenault said.
“We have to look at the drainage system maps,” she said. “We have to pull up manhole covers, see which ones are dry, what has product in them, which ones don’t. What has sheen? What doesn’t have sheen?”
With that detective work, she said, they should be able to narrow down the source.
Complicating that is the fact that the watershed of the Muddy River covers six square miles of Boston and Brookline. Any rainfall in that area eventually runs into the river — along with everything else that comes with it.
“The Muddy River is actually the most polluted above-ground tributary or stream that flows into the Charles River,” said Lisa Kumpf, the river restoration program manager for the Charles River Watershed Association.
A major restoration project by the Army Corps of engineers has recently targeted the Muddy River’s issues with flooding, but water quality remains a challenge, Kumpf said.
“The health of this river is absolutely a problem,” she said. “This is a major recreational resource for so many people in Boston and Brookline, and what we need to do is take this watershed-wide view.”
She said that would mean steps like reworking stormwater infrastructure and evaluating sources of pollution along the Muddy River’s watershed.
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This story was originally published by GBH. It was shared as part of the New England News Collaborative.
