Kylie Clatterbuck’s Journey from Deepwater Horizon to Wildlife Hero
By Evelyn McDonnell
In 2010, the oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 people and, over 87 days, spilling 4 million barrels of oil into the water. Kylie Clatterbuck had been working at International Bird Rescue in San Pedro just two years when she received the call to go to the gulf, as part of an international team tasked with cleaning and saving hundreds of thousands of brown pelicans, laughing gulls, royal terns and other birds. For Clatterbuck, in her mid-20s and newly married at the time, it was a life changer.
“My first spill being such a large event was an eye opener to what a response can look like in terms of people coming together to help mitigate it and help make it right in some way,” says Clatterbuck, now the Wildlife Center manager at IBR. “I think it was the first time I saw a 100% oiled animal still surviving. Seeing the resiliency of those birds, especially the pelicans, was really inspiring because you look at that bird and you just imagine, how is it still alive? Just seeing groups from all different states down there, all coming together, all with the passion to save wildlife and working together to make that happen. I saw birds go from 100% oiled to being released. That sealed the deal as something that I just love doing: love being around animals, love saving animals, love the high intensity of the emergency work.”
Clatterbuck has been helping to save aquatic birds in the Los Angeles area for 16 years now. She showed me around the hospital, which is generally off-limits to the public due to the high susceptibility of birds to stress caused by human interaction. On that June day the pens, pools and aviaries were still dominated by brown pelicans, a species that showed up sick, dying,and dead in unusual numbers on the Pacific coast in a stranding event this spring. But there were also grebes, gulls, loons and even an albatross who had hitched a ride to the port on a ship. Some had injuries: fish hooks in stomachs, torn pouches, broken wings. Others were diseased, starving, or simply too young to make it on their own.
Not every patient I saw that day survived. But thanks to Clatterbuck and the center’s 10 employees and 100 volunteers, many of them did. The IBR has a 30% to 40% success rate, she says — an impressive figure considering that “we always say that birds coming in the door are essentially dead birds. It’s not just whatever injury they have or whatever illness. They’ve also been sitting on a beach, or under a bush, hiding, trying to keep themselves safe for weeks, so they’re emaciated, they’re dehydrated, they’re on death’s door. We do our best to save every animal that comes in.”
Clatterbuck’s job is not glamorous. A facility filled with birds who eat fish and do not use a litter box is going to have a distinct aroma no matter how well you clean. Like most nonprofit work, the pay stinks a bit too. Death of the creatures you are trying to save is a constant reality. But for Clatterbuck, the airborne poop, the mites and the risk of avian flu are all validated by the experience of watching a once doomed creature fly ― or swim ― back into the world.
I talked to the mother of two about how she found herself rescuing waterfowl. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
Kylie Clatterbuck
I was born out east but grew up in Southern California, around Temecula. I have always loved animals. And so for me, especially growing up a little bit more inland, I always wanted to be going to the beach. We didn’t travel much to the ocean until I was in high school and I could drive and get out there myself and boogie board and really hang out — you know, just lay on the beach all day and soak in the sun. To me it’s relaxing, it’s peaceful and it’s a good reminder of the nature around you because it’s so immersive: the touch of the sand and the sound of the ocean and the heat of the sun.
At the time, marine biology was a rising profession, and so I got looped into that and really just fascinated by the ocean animals and all the different variety of species, and the way that they live. Oceans are always a little bit of a mystery to me, in terms of how creatures can survive in that. Cal State Long Beach has an incredible marine biology program, so I got my bachelor of science there.
From there, I worked at Cabrillo Marine Aquarium as an outreach instructor. We would go to inner city schools, bring portable touch tanks, and just try to connect students in areas where they hadn’t even been to the ocean before. What really connects kids is being able to touch something that you’ve never touched. I was hoping that the kids would go home and tell their mom that they got to touch a sea cucumber today or a sea star and teach their families as well.
It’s also partially why I love working here: just getting to touch the birds. Something that you see from afar, that’s not always reachable. You end up feeling very special.
Flipper was huge when I was a kid. And I remember in the ’90s, all the little Lisa Frank stickers were always dolphins and whales. That brought a lot of people, especially women, to science in a way that connects them with animals in the ocean. Most of my colleagues are women. A lot of veterinary practices and a lot of things that have to do with animals are very women-led.
I don’t really discriminate against animals. I like all animals. So for me, it was like, well, let’s try birds. I came in for my interview and the manager was in the middle of examining a pelican and she wasn’t quite ready to start. So she’s like, here, can you hold this pelican for me? I was dressed nicely. I’m like, okay. So the very first moment I walked in and I’m restraining this pelican. That locked me in.
This job provides research experience too. A lot of what we do here is bettering the care of animals, and spreading the knowledge of the things that we’ve learned to other organizations. We’re constantly learning new things and trying new things and changing things that we have been doing for 15 years because we realize there’s a better way to do it.
I love talking about birds to people who might not care. Each individual’s different, each species is different. They teach you so much and they’re resilient. You see them coming in with these horrific injuries and they’re still alive. They’re still trying their best to survive, and just the fact that you can help them a little bit and help them survive and give them a second chance in the wild — it’s really, really gratifying to be able to do that work.
Unfortunately, many of the things that we see are caused by human conflict or the changing world essentially. We deal with a lot of fishing hook and fishing line injuries. We deal with natural seep oiling and oiling from refineries or pipelines, and habitat destruction as well.
One of my fondest memories is in 2021 we had a colony of elegant terns that were startled from their nesting habitat down in Bolsa Chica and decided to nest on two barges in Long Beach. As soon as the babies started to grow up and totter around, they’d fall off these barges into the cold water. It was a huge response with a lot of different organizations involved. It’s one of the biggest conservation efforts that I’ve been part of. We do oil spill response all the time, but this is actually a habitat issue. There’s not enough nesting grounds for these birds. So that response opened up a whole other avenue for bird rescue. Something that we’re still trying to work on is how can we provide these birds with better nesting habitats in our urban environment. And what can we do to mitigate the space that we’re taking from these animals so that they thrive just as much as we’re thriving? I think that’s what keeps me here at this job is it’s a new challenge every year, especially with how global warming can affect these animals, directly or indirectly.
It’s hard to connect climate change directly [to distressed birds]. But we can suspect that the ocean’s warming, so it’s changing the availability and location of food. Even with these two recent pelican stranding events that we’ve had, in 2022 and the most recent one, we’re seeing juvenile birds and adult birds having trouble finding their prey. How are the birds eventually going to adapt if this happens every year, every couple of years? We see pelicans that are really susceptible to fishing hook and fishing line injuries, as they get desperate for food and take those extra chances to find the fish that they need.
Some of those fishing line injuries, it’s about, clean up, clean up after yourself. Don’t leave your fishing hooks out. Don’t leave your fishing line out. Enjoy your hobby in a responsible way so that everyone can coexist. I mean, that’s what we’re trying to do, right? We’re trying to coexist with wildlife. Be patient with the birds. I think people get very frustrated with birds that are lingering around their boats or trying to steal their catch. We’ve seen plenty of injuries that we suspect are human-caused.
IBR began in 1971 with a tanker collision in the San Francisco Bay. There was a bunch of Western grebes, scooters ― many of those pelagic birds all oiled along the beaches. People were out there collecting them in their bathing suits. Nobody knew what to do. They just saw animals in need, and it’s instinct for a lot of people just to want to be able to help them. So that’s where our founders Alice Berkner and Jay Holcomb came into play. They realized, we don’t know what we’re doing, and this is something that could potentially happen time and time again. We can’t always let these animals die.
They started International Bird Rescue, and that grew and grew. And now we have two centers, one here and one up in Fairfield, near San Francisco. We have a turnkey facility in Alaska as well. We have responded all over the world to 200-plus oil spills and different conservation efforts. We’re part of a global network of oil spill responders. Luckily, oil spills are less and less these days. Safety measures have increased, and people are more aware of how this can affect animals. They’re also aware of people like us at Bird Rescue. Everyone has their opinions about oil companies and oil in general, but we’re here to support the animals. So we’re not going to knock those companies. We want to work together at those emergency events.
We got over 360 pelicans at our center within just a couple of weeks in the last stranding event. We’ve done these events before, we know how they work. Pelicans do amazing in care. This year was unique though, because we had probably 40% of them had some severe injury, most of those including fishing hook and fishing line injuries. I believe we’ve had about six pouch lacerations due to fishing hook wounds. Also lots of constriction wounds, fishing line wrapped around their legs or wrapped around their wings. Hook wounds all over their bodies. That’s not something I saw in 2022 in as high of frequencies as we have this year. Pelicans areindicator species of things that are happening in the environment, so we watch them very closely. Biologists really pay attention to how their nesting seasons go and that sort of thing.
Not many rehab centers have the ability to band, so we can track survivability. We’ve seen our blue-band pelicans nesting down in Baja, we’ve seen many thriving even during this past crash. Thriving ones that we’ve just released are up in Oregon now.
We have so many human-influenced issues, I think it’s right that we do our part. All animals play some part in our world, and I want my kids to be able to see all these animals and their kids to be able to see it and appreciate it.
Evelyn McDonnell is the author or editor of eight books, an internationally recognized award-winning journalist, and a professor at Loyola Marymount University. She writes the series Bodies of Water – portraits of lives aquatic – for Random Lengths.
Copyright Evelyn McDonnell 2024