CLOSER LOOK MAY PUT 2 SPECIES ON INJURED LIST
VOTE WOULD FREE OIL-SPILL MONEY FOR STUDY OF DAMAGE TO COMMON LOONS, KITTLITZ'S MURRELETS

By NATALIE PHILLIPS
Daily News reporter

ANCHORAGE- After the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, government officials identified 17 species of birds and mammals as injured by the nearly 11-million-gallon spill. Now they are considering adding two more to the list -- the common loon and the Kittlitz's murrelet.

''We really don't have any new information,'' said Bob Spies, chief scientist for the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council. ''We are just stepping back and looking at the available data.''

Being on the Trustee Council's injured species list clears the way for the council to fund studies of the species. The trustees will vote at their annual budget meeting today whether to add the two birds to the list.

They also will consider a proposed $18 million budget for 1996. Most of that money, about $12 million, would go to the Restoration Reserve Fund. The council has committed to placing $108 million in the fund over the next six years so there will be a trust fund for future studies and research. The rest of the proposed budget is for administrative costs, species studies and continued monitoring.

Trustee Council scientists plan to review the entire injured species list this winter to determine if any of the species have recovered and now can be taken off the list. Exxon officials would not comment on the list or possible additions, said Ed Burwell, a company spokesman in Irving, Texas.

The injured species list includes bald eagles, killer whales, river otters, common murres, harbor seals, harlequin ducks, herring, sea otters and pink salmon.

The list also includes the marbled murrelet, a small seabird that comes to shore to breed in old-growth forests. But it does not include the Kittlitz's murrelet, a similar but rarer murrelet that breeds on bare rock and glaciated moraines.

Murrelets -- both marbled and Kittlitz's -- are brown with mottled white spots. In the winter, their plumage changes to black above and white below. The marbled murrelet has a longer bill than the Kittlitz's murrelet. The flight of both birds flight is rapid and their wings long and pointed. They are almost always seen in pairs and are believed to mate for life.

Bird biologists estimate there are only 20,000 Kittlitz's murrelets in the world, and most live in the spill area. After the spill, cleanup workers found 1,092 murrelet carcasses. Of that, 612 were marbled murrelets and 72 were Kittlitz's murrelets. The rest were not identified.

''Assuming that some of the recovered-but-unidentified murrelet carcasses are Kittlitz's and that more murrelets actually died than were recovered,'' the death toll for Kittlitz's ''may be as high or higher than that of any other single species affected by the oil spill,'' Spies wrote in his recommendation for adding the bird to the injured list.

Oil spill workers picked up 396 loon carcases during the spill cleanup. Most of those -- 216 -- were identified as common loons.

''We don't have very good population estimates for loons in general, but they are long-lived and fairly slow reproducing,'' Spies said Thursday. ''There may be just several thousand in the spill area.'' The recovered carcasses may represent as little as 10 percent of the total number of loons killed, Spies said.

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