A study co-sponsored by NRDC and Pembina Institute, a Canadian non-profit research organization, reports that Alberta's tar mining is destroying the boreal forest which supports at least 292 species of breeding birds. "Danger in the Nursery" says that exploitation of the world's largest oil deposit outside of Saudi Arabia could claim more than 160 million birds that live in Canada's northern forests. Site preparation drains lakes, diverts streams and rivers, clear cuts forests, and denudes the earth of vegetation. Huge hydraulic shovels and trucks are used to dig as deep as 100 meters to recover bitumen. Resources too deep to recover by strip mining are extracted using drilling and melting techniques requiring a dense industrial infrastructure that is even more destructive of 
wild habitat. What few natural features remain in the mining area are polluted perhaps beyond reclamation. In April of last year about 500 ducks died after landing on a tailings pond near an operation in Alberta. Of course the wholesale destruction would not be occurring except for an insatiable market for oil to the south. Processing bitumen--a sludge mixed with sand, clay and water--generates three times the greenhouse gas emissions than a barrel of conventional oil. This kind of rape of our planet just does not make sense for our own survival. r: endangered whooping crane whose migration route crosses the tar sands region [AP photo]
l: olive sided flycatcher