All tag results for 'louisiana'

Louie, the only living dolphin collected off the coast of Louisiana after the worst oil spill in history, is doing great!

The young 2-year-old dolphin was found covered in oil with injuries sustained from another dolphin and an estimated 2% chance of survival.

He was transferred to the Audubon Aquatic Center in New Orleans where it took over 2 weeks for the little dolphin to show signs of improvement.

Louie was finally declared healthy after a 5-month period of rehabilitation which included 700 hours of care!

Michele Kelley, who oversees the rescue of stranded animals in Louisiana for the Audubon Aquatic Center, said:

"You cry. You shed tears. You put five months into this animal, his rehab and seeing him everyday and taking care of him. Then it's time for him to go and we know that it's the best thing for him."

Although healthy, it is still too risky to release the young dolphin into the wild, so he was transferred this week to the Dolphin Research Center in the Florida Keys which cares for rescued dolphins.

We're happy to hear Louie, the only surviving dolphin out of 62 found off the coast of Louisiana since the oil spill, is healthy and on the fast track to a full recovery!

Tags: florida, louisiana, oil spill, recovery, rescued, research

The beautiful Ali Landry graces the cover of K-9 Magazine this month with her family's dog Toulouse!

They make a lovely pair if we say so ourselves!

In an interview for the magazine, Ali says her love of animals started when she was a kid because she grew up on a dairy farm in Louisiana, explaining:

"I was constantly surrounded by animals. We had everything: chickens, cows, birds, bulls, cats, dogs, and even a hamster."

That's quite a collection. We wish we had her childhood now!

Pick up the latest issue of K-9 to read more about what Ali has to say about dogs, life, and her wishes for her own pets to make a difference in the community!

Tags: animals, bulls, chickens, community, interview, louisiana, magazine

What's happening?

Something is happening!

But this time…M. Night Shyamalan isn't behind it.

More birds have fallen on our northern neighbors land!

A farmer in Quebec has found 80 dead birds on his land and apparently more are falling.

Sylvain Turmel first noticed the dead birds in his field on Dec. 18 and said:

"I found two dead birds in the morning, which is normal, birds sometimes die, but when I came back one hour later, another 25 had fallen. In the time it took me to pick them up, five more fell to the ground!"

Dead birds littered this holiday season in Arkansas, Louisiana and Sweden, but officials have yet to give a solid explanation as to WHY they died leaving everyone on edge.

Canada isn't any closer to solving the mystery either as wildlife officials with Quebec's Ministry of Natural Resources collected the birds for analysis, but are also stumped.

Turmel hasn't gotten very many details as he says:

"All they can tell me is that it's not avian influenza, it's not the West Nile virus, and it's not poison," which is what officials suspected at first. It won't stop. I'm finding more [dead] birds every day."

David Bird, a wildlife biologist at McGill University in Montreal, said he's been receiving plenty of phone calls about the birds, but is not alarmed.

According to the expert, this type of phenomenon is more common than people realize. He says:

"First of all, it's not a biblical curse. It's not a death ray from an alien space ship. There are many cases where birds get hit by hailstorms or get lost in the fog and they die of starvation and they just fall dead out of the sky."

Bird thinks each incident has its own unique cause and there is no need for people to panic, as he continues:

"I think this is a case where it's just coincidental … and people are trying to link them together."

Maybe this does happen all the time, but how come it has never been covered so much by the media or received this much attention?

What do U think?

[Image via AP Images.]

Tags: arkansas, bird flu, canada, death, end of the world, farm, louisiana, sweden, virus

We WERE happy to say that we ruled out biblical plague…but now we're not so sure once again.

Earlier today, we mentioned that officials believe the thousands of bird deaths in Arkansas were a result of massive trauma.

Now, we've learned about ANOTHER incident where 500 birds fell out of the sky in Louisiana, 300 miles south of the bird-death location in Arkansas.

According to authorities, these birds died due to blood clots that formed from internal injuries.

SO how'd they get the injuries then?

We REALLY hope this doesn't happen again, and we ESPECIALLY hope it doesn't happen anywhere near us!

Tags: arkansas, biblical plague, bird deaths, blood clots, falling, internal injuries, louisiana, massive trauma, sky

There has been a recent estimation concerning the animal deaths from the BP oil spill.

According to Restore the Gulf, the official federal government's website dealing with this situation there have been 6,104 dead birds, 609 dead sea turtles and 100 dead mammals, including dolphins.

These numbers include the 5 states: Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Texas.

These numbers do come from only an initial field-level evaluation and all of these deaths may not have been due to the oil.

After the animals are found, Amore thorough examinations are done, such as a search for oil in the throat, mouth and eyes to rule if the spill was to blame.

Experts collected 535 living sea turtles, 456 of which were visibly oiled. Only two out of nine live mammals collected were visibly oiled. The birds did not do so good, 2,079 have been collected alive, every single one of them visibly oiled.

[Image via AP Images.]

Tags: alabama, animals, dead, florida, gulf, louisiana, mississippi, oil spill, texas

Absolutely devastating.

Check out (above) this photo of a Louisiana waterway that has become overwhelmed with various species of dead sea life, which even allegedly includes a dead whale.

Although 'dead zones' - which are areas of water that don't have enough oxygen to support life - are apparently common during stretches in the summer in this area, it's normally never on this scale nor does it affect more than one species at a time.

Many have speculated that this is an indirect result of the BP oil spill in the Gulf - oil-eating microbes have been present in the waters since the incident, and those allegedly require quite a bit of oxygen when consuming the oil particles.

Billy Nungesser, who took the photos, says:

"We can't continue to see these fish kills. We need some additional tests to find out why these fish are dying in large numbers. If it is low oxygen, we need to identify the cause."

Agreed completley.

This is horrific news, and we sincerely hope that scientists take the time to figure out just exactly what's going on with these deaths.

Who knows what other unexpected long-term effects this oil spill will have on the ecosystem? Awful.

[Image via Billy Nungesser/WWL.]

Tags: billy nungesser, dead, devastating, effects, gulf, louisiana, massive, oil spill, sea life