Environmental protection order issued to Syncrude after deaths of blue herons

The death of approximately 30 great blue herons at the Syncrude Canada Mildred Lake oilsands mining site north of Fort McMurray has raised concerns about the effectiveness of the industry’s waterfowl and bird monitoring program.

Colleen Cassady St. Clair was the lead researcher of the Research on Avian Protection Project, a three-year study published in 2014 that looked at increasing protection of birds in Alberta’s oilsands after 1,600 died at a Syncrude tailings pond in 2008.

“Thirty birds in the Alberta population of great blue heron is trivial in terms of the population biology, but it’s quite significant in terms of what it reveals about the comprehensiveness of these monitoring programs and about the awareness we all have of the ways they can fail,” St. Clair said Tuesday.