A lawyer for the oil sands company charged with illegally killing 1,606 ducks is lashing out at provincial wildlife officials for "showboating," and using a dying bird as a prop.
Images of bitumen-soaked ducks showed in graphic detail the plight of the birds after they landed on a toxic mine-effluent pond belonging to Syncrude Canada Ltd. in April, 2008. They were shown to a judge Tuesday as part of a trial in which Syncrude is defending itself against charges it violated both federal and provincial environmental regulations.
One particularly poignant sequence of images showed a duck being circled by a raven, then attacked and eventually eaten. A second raven then joins in. The pictures, taken by a senior Alberta wildlife biologist, are disturbing.
But Syncrude lawyer Robert White attacked the biologist, Todd Powell, for taking photos of the attack rather than shooting the distressed duck.
"What was more important to these people? Horrifying us with pictures of these ravens eating that poor duck? Why not put that poor thing out of its misery and shoot it?" he said. "They were far more interested in bringing photographs of that poor thing being eaten alive, which makes me sick to my stomach … than they were looking after the suffering of that animal."
Wildlife workers did, in fact, shoot a dozen ducks that were considered too oil-covered to survive. A short video sequence played before the court shows a duck covered in black, with only a green plume on its head indicating that it is a male mallard.
As workers in a boat approach, the bird turns away. It raises its wings, but cannot unfurl the heavily oil-coated feathers. It surges up from the thick, floating mat of tarry bitumen it is stuck in. But it is unable to take off. The duck dips its head into the water twice, emerging each time with chunks of bitumen dripping from its bill.
The video, only 43 seconds long, ends. Soon after, the workers on a Syncrude boat euthanized the bird with a shotgun blast, one of a dozen to meet that fate on April 29, 2008.
"It seemed a much more humane approach than leaving them to struggle like that," said Mr. Powell, the biologist whose graphic video provided the first public glimpse of the duck deaths.
Several accompanying photos show dead Canada geese, and a bald eagle soaring along the edge of the tailings pond, a 12-kilometre-square water body filled with toxic mine effluent.
Others show workers inside the company's truck washing bay, where they attempt to save the three ducks that were netted from the lake in hopes they could be saved.
Syncrude has apologized for the deaths of the ducks, but has argued that it committed no crime, and pleaded not guilty to the charges. Rather, it made a mistake from which it has learned, lawyers from the company have said.
"There's a reason why there are so many perished this time [in 2008] And it has to do with a combination of circumstances that had not been foreseen. We now have learned from them," Mr. White said, pointing to a major investment by Syncrude in new technology designed to detect and scare away ducks.
"The reason that steps have been taken, with an expenditure of several million dollars to keep it from happening again, is that we simply can't live with that," Mr. White said. "This is not a callous company."
The trial is expected to last two months.